Putting certain tick labels in boldface (but not all of them)?

Question

In MATLAB I have a graph with some tick labels. I'd like to visually emphasize a few of these labels, but not all of them. Is there a way to only put SOME tick labels in boldface?

Answer 1

Though I can't tell if it wasn't possible in the past, but nowadays (at least from R2014b) one could just use tex markup:

plot(0:10,0:10);
h = gca;
h.XTickLabel = {'\bf \color{red} 0','2','\bf 4','6','\bf \color{red} 8','10',}

Answer 2

Tick labels are not individual objects. They belong to axes and their properties determined by axes.

What you can do is to remove tick labels and replace them with text objects. In this case you can control the text properties.

plot(magic(5))
xticks = get(gca,'XTick'); %# x tick positions
xlabels = cellstr(get(gca,'XTickLabel')); %# get the x tick labels as cell array of strings
set(gca,'XTickLabel',[]) %# remove the labels from axes
n = numel(xlabels);
yl = ylim;
idx1 = 1:2:n; %# 1st set of ticks
idx2 = 2:2:n; %# 2nd set
t1 = text(xticks(idx1),repmat(yl(1),numel(idx1),1), xlabels(idx1), ...
    'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','top');
t2 = text(xticks(idx2),repmat(yl(1),numel(idx2),1), xlabels(idx2), ...
    'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','top');
set(t2,'FontWeight','bold') %# make the 2nd set bold