Matlab choose random color for plotting

Question

I have 6 vectors which I want to plot. How I can make each plot with different color (random)? With the code below, the plot limited to one color for all six vectors.

plot(x,y,'-rs','LineWidth',1,...       'MarkerEdgeColor','k',...       'MarkerFaceColor','g',...       'MarkerSize',5); 

Answer 1

You can have PLOT automatically choose line colors for you. If all 6 of your vectors are the same length, you can put the x and y coordinates into N-by-6 matrices X and Y and pass these to PLOT. A different color will be used for each column:

plot(X,Y,'-s');  %# Plots lines with square markers 

You could also use some of the built-in colormaps to generate a set of colors, then use these when you plot each line separately. For example:

cmap = hsv(6);  %# Creates a 6-by-3 set of colors from the HSV colormap for i = 1:6     %# Loop 6 times   plot(X(:,i),Y(:,i),'-s','Color',cmap(i,:));  %# Plot each column with a                                                %#   different color end 

Answer 2

To create a random color map, you could do the following

myMap = rand(nbColors, 3); for i = 1:nbColors   plot(X(:,i),Y(:,i),'-s','Color',myMap(i,:)); end 

However, as I stated in my comment to gnovice's answer, picking colors out of a colormap generally provides much more readable color combinations.