"Column Vector" XTick labels

Consider the following plot:

plot(0:2,2-(0:2),'*'),xticks([0 1 2]),xticklabels({'(0,2)','(1,1}','(2,0)'})

I want to keep the "plot" as is, just change the labeling for the x axis ticks., so that each xtick label would be a column vector instead of a pair in parentheses. For instance,

0     1     2
2     1     0

instead of

(0,2) (1,1) (2,0)

Is this possible?

Answer 1

[Voss]

plot(0:2,2-(0:2),'*')
xticks([0 1 2])

xticklabels(sprintfc('%d\\newline%d',[0 2 1 1 2 0]))

[Mark Stone]

Excellent. Thanks. (Modulo the typo of 1 rather than 0 for the last array elment.)

[Voss]

You're welcome! (Typo is now fixed - thanks for pointing that out!)

[dpb]

Hmmm....where did you find/learn that "\newline" spelled out is interpreted by TeX as "\n"? I'd never seen that before.

I had tried \n which was interpreted literally so reverted to text that does allow the embedded \n in the string.

[Voss]

@dpb: I also tried \n first. It seemed that MATLAB used \n to separate the labels:

xticks() % leaving xticks at its default, for the time being

ans = 1×6

0 0.2000 0.4000 0.6000 0.8000 1.0000

xtl = sprintfc('%d\n%d',[0 2 1 1 2 0])

xtl = 1×3 cell array
    {'0↵2'}    {'1↵1'}    {'2↵0'}

xticklabels(xtl)

Then I remembered another answer I had seen recently, about emboldening a single xticklabel (an answer of yours, incidentally):

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1718400-hi-there-i-want-to-show-only-one-x-axis-value-on-0-value-bold-character-in-my-x-axis-i-already#answer_963595

There, sending \bf to the TeX interpreter solved the problem, so I tried to do the same thing here but with a line break. I had to look up how to make a line break in TeX, and what I found was this question:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27028/what-is-the-difference-between-newline-and

which suggested that \newline was the way to go, so I tried it out and it seemed to work.

[dpb]

I guess I had never looked that up before, or if had done in the past, had certainly forgotten it.

The undocumented sprintfc is handy, too; that replaces the functionality I got with the loop and explicit cast. I hadn't stumbled over it before, either...

Answer 2

[dpb]

I don't think so with the tick labels(*), but you can write them with text as

v1=[0:2];v2=[2:-1:0];
for i=1:3
  xtl(i)=cellstr(sprintf('%d\n%d',v1(i),v2(i)));
end
xticklabels([])
text(xticks,repmat(-0.02,1,3),xtl,'VerticalAlignment',"top")

(*) When try to write string with embedded \n, the internals of xticklabels converts each to another string element so you end up with it thinking 2X the labels than number of ticks.

[Mark Stone]

Thanks. Is the repmat'd value -0.02 a "magic" number which always works to make the alignment come out well? Does what that number "should be" depend on the numerical values in v1 and v2?

[dpb]

Yeah, it is "magic" number as shown -- because the default coordinates for text are in 'data' units. This can be set to be 'normalized' which are the units of the axes and then a fixed offset from the lower position number is the invariant way to place.