New line in axis tick labels in Matlab

Question

Is there a way to have a new line in an axis tick label in Matlab to produce a multiline tick label?

The two suggestions from here for other text elements don't seem to work:

set(gca,'xticklabel',{{'line1','line2'}}) 

fails, and

set(gca,'xticklabel',{['line1' 10 'line2']}) 

or

set(gca,'xticklabel',{['line1' 13 'line2']}) 

ignore the newline or carriage return. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I am not sure how long it has been around, but at least in R2015b the axes objects have a 'TickLabelInterpreter' property, which can be specified to set how the tick labels are interpreted. If you choose a LaTeX interpreter, it is possible to have multiline ticklabels quite easily by wrapping them in a tabular environment.

Example:

figure;
plot(rand(10,1));
%// Tick label with arbitrary number of lines in tabular environment
xtl = '\begin{tabular}{c} line 1 \\ line 2 \\ line 3\\ line 4\end{tabular}';
%// use the tick label at location 5 on the x axis
set(gca,'xtick', 5, 'XTickLabel', xtl, 'TickLabelInterpreter', 'latex');

Output:

Of course, the drawback here is that you need to use the LaTeX interpreter which somewhat changes the appearance of the figure. But I believe some people (such as me) actually prefer the way the LaTeX interpreted figure annotations look! As an added bonus, you can use whatever other LaTeX markup you desire (equations, etc.) in the labels.

Answer 2

I suggest you use fix_xticklabels() by Mikhail Erofeev. You can pad your tick labels with space character i.e. " " to adjust the output.