How can I start the y axis of my plot with 1 but keep increments at 5, 10, 15 and so on?

I want the y axis of my plot to start with 1 instead of 0. If I do that with

set(gca,'YTickLabel',0:5:n)

it starts with 0, if I do it instead with

set(gca,'YTickLabel',1:5:n)

it starts with 1 but the increment is set at 6, 11 and so on.

I uploaded a picture to show you exactly what I mean:

[Stephen23]

"1 but the increment is set at 6, 11 and so on."

That is correct if you set the step to 5. Think about the differences between the values.

Do you really need a special case for the first value?

[Maus]

I just want it to look like the right picture. 6, 11,... as increments don't look good. I'd maybe like to have a special case for the first increment which should only be 4 numbers above the first one but each one after that to be set 5 numbers higher.

Answer 1

[Adam]

ylim( hAxes, [1 n] );
hAxes.YTick = [ 1 hAxes.YTick ];

should achieve this, though if your plot is dynamic with a changing range it gets more messy when you start manually changing ticks because ticks will no longer update automatically with the range.

I have debated whether to do similar myself often. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, especially with images where I want to have nice tick values, but also include the first and last tick explicitly without it giving me silly intermediate ticks. Often it looks a bit odd though.

[Maus]

Thank you for your help, but I get an error message:

Undefined function or variable 'hAxes'.

Error in plotwaterfall (line 23)
ylim( hAxes, [1 n] );

Have I done sth. wrong?

[Adam]

Oh yeah, sorry, I keep forgetting that when I give answers. I always use an explicit axes handle in these type of instructions. You can put

hAxes = gca;

above those instructions though if you have the axes handle from a more reliable source then using that is better. That is all hAxes is though, just the axes handle.

When I create a new figure I often do something like this:

figure; hAxes = gca;

as using 'gca' there is pretty safe and then you have a proper axes handle to use thereafter. You can be even more fussy with getting the figure's axes totally explicitly, but I tend not to bother.

[Maus]

Thank you again but now the problem is that the first trace is set directly in the x axis. It still doesn't start with 1. What have I done wrong?

[Stephen23]

ylim(hAxes,[0 n]);

You want the axes limit to be zero (or some appropriate value less than one), if you do not want the data at one to be hidden under the axes.

[Maus]

I get this error message again:

Value must be a vector of type single or double whose values increase

Error in plotwaterfall (line 20)
hAxes.YTick = [ 1 hAxes.YTick ];

[Adam]

If you are using 0 as the lower y limit then

hAxes.YTick(1) = 1;

should work instead. Again though, if the plot will change after the initial plotting this can get messy.

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

Without your data, writing specific code to do what you want can be difficult.

Try this:

x = 0:100;                                                          % Create Data
y = bsxfun(@plus, rand(15,101), (1:15)');                           % Create Data

figure(1)
plot(x, y)
yt = get(gca, 'YTick');
set(gca, 'YTick',[0 5:5:max(yt)], 'YTickLabel',[1 5:5:max(yt)])