area, stairs

Is there any property setting for 'area' function which generates the 'straits' for the boundary of the colored regions instead of 'plot' curves?

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/creating_plots/f10-19972.html#f10-1833

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

% Random row input

x = 1:10;
y = rand(1,10);

% Normal area chart

subplot(3,1,1)
area(x,y)

% Stairs chart (non area)

subplot(3,1,2)
stairs(x,y)

% Stairs area

subplot(3,1,3)
x = [x;x];
y = [y;y];
area(x([2:end end]),y(1:end))

[Hamed Amini]

Very Clever! Thanks Oleg.

Answer 2

[Bill Tubbs]

Building on Oleg's answer I wrote a function for doing the same thing with a stacked area plot. However, the data in the x and Y arguments here are aligned vertically in the rows, not horizontally in the columns.

function area_step_plot(x, Y)
    assert(size(x, 2) == 1)
    nx = size(x, 1);
    Y = Y(1:nx-1, :);  % final y-values are not used
    ny = size(Y, 2);
    X = [x x]';
    X2 = X(2:end-1)';
    Y2 = reshape(permute(cat(3, Y, Y), [3 1 2]), [], ny);
    area(X2, Y2)
end

The Y argument can be a matrix of column vectors containing different data series.

x = (1:10)';
Y = rand(10, 3);  % Note: last row is not plotted
area_step_plot(x, Y)