Axis equal plot in multiple axes GUI

Hello everybody,

I have a question for you! I have made a code that creates a figure (that initially is invisible) with two axes; in one of the two axes I plot a circle and I need to make this axes with axis equal.

I found on the internet the command axes(..); axis equal, but if I run the code with debugger I saw that when Matlab executes this command, it make the figure visible and I don't need it.

I would need something that make the axis equal, but without showing the figure until the very end of the code when I make it visible; is it possible? Thank you

Here is a simple example that show what happen:

function sample()

    f = figure('Visible','off','Position',[300,500,700,500]);
    ha = axes('Units','pixels','Position',[50,50,200,400]);
    ha_1 = axes('Units','pixels','Position',[300,50,300,400]);

    % plot in ha
    r = 60;
    th = 0:pi/50:2*pi;
    x = r*cos(th');
    y = r*sin(th');
    plot(ha,x,y)
    axes(ha); axis equal

    f.Units = 'normalized';
    f.Visible = 'on';

end

Answer 1

[Adam]

The documentation for the

axis equal

command states that the following axes properties change:

'Sets DataAspectRatio to [1 1 1], sets PlotBoxAspectRatio to [3 4 4], and sets the associated mode properties to manual.'

So you could just set

ha.DataAspectRatio = [1 1 1];
ha.PlotBoxAspectRatio = [3 4 4];

and if it doesn't already do it by doing that ( I can't remember) set

ha.DataAspectRatioMode = 'manual';
ha.PlotBoxAspectRatio = 'manual';

too.

To be honest that specific PlotBoxAspectRatio is a bit of a mystery to me, but that is what it says and I never really play around with those settings to have bothered to learn exactly what that does.

[Adam]

Alternatively you could just do

axes(ha); axis equal; f.Visible = 'off'

but that is rather ugly - letting it switch the figure visibility on and then over-riding it to switch it off again. It is possible that the user may see this happen too - I haven't tried it, maybe it happens fast enough that the user doesn't see a flicker. I have done it successfully in similar cases.