Color text based on a variable

I am trying to make a plot of 3 properties of chemical elements. I would like the first property on the x-axis, the second on the y-axis, and the third presented by the color of the plot points. Using 'scatter' to do this is trivial, e.g.:

x=1:10;
y=1:10;
c=1:10;
figure
xlim([0 11]);ylim([0 11])
scatter(x,y,50,c,'.')
colorbar

However, I would like the graph to plot the abbreviation for the chemical in question, rather than a standard matlab symbol...

I can do this using the 'text' command:

x=1:10;
y=1:10;
chem={'H','He','Li','Be','B','C','N','O','F','Ne'};
figure
xlim([0 11]);ylim([0 11])
text(x,y,chem)

But I want to color the text labels to correspond to a colorbar representing my third parameter, as they are in the scatter plot.

I cannot find a way to do this - any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

x=1:10;
y=1:10;
c=1:10;
chem={'H','He','Li','Be','B','C','N','O','F','Ne'};
h=figure(1);
xlim([0 11]);ylim([0 11]);
scatter(x,y,50,c,'.')
colorbar;
col=get(h,'colormap');
h_text=text(x,y,chem);
for k=1:length(h_text)
    set(h_text(k),'color',col(k*6,:))
end

[Oscar Branson]

Thanks!

[Oscar Branson]

P.S. For anyone looking at this later on and wondering why there's a '*6' in the line:

set(h_text(k),'color','col(k*6,:))

it's because the colormap is a 64 row array of 3-column RGB values. As we have 10 labels here, multiplying k by 6 will evenly space the colors across the colormap. A more adaptable code is:

lcol=size(colormap,1);

for k=1:length(h_text)

set(h_text(k),'color',col(k*round(c(k)*lcol/max(c)),:))

end

[Fangjun Jiang]

Nice add-on!