Color along line in polaraxes

I am trying to combine two "solved" aspects of MATLAB -- 1) plotting a 2D line with color that varies along the line in 2) polar axes.

The first part is usually easy, and frequently asked: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/5042-how-do-i-vary-color-along-a-2d-line or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8559133/how-to-vary-the-line-color-of-a-matlab-plot-like-colormap

The most commonly suggested trick is to use surf or mesh to create a "fake" 3D line and color this. However, this is not supported on polaraxesin MATLAB:

>> polaraxes, hold on;
>> surf([1 1; 1 1], [2 2; 2 2], [3 3; 3 3])
Error using newplot (line 80)
Adding Cartesian plot to polaraxes is not supported

One trick that does seem to work is using a sequence of line segments, as is done in cline.m from File Exchange.

>> polaraxes; hold on; cline;

Gives this

which is technically what I want... but as pointed out in the previous comments, is much uglier than the solution with surf or mesh since it draws individual segments.

Is there any other way to do this? I found this question also asked here https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/439176-how-do-i-vary-the-color-along-a-line-in-polar-coordinateswith an "accepted answer" that this does not seem possible, so I'm feeling a little pessimistic.

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

What if you interpolate along a dense line and plot with polarscatter?

I'm thinking something like this:

theta = linspace(0,6*pi,100000);
rho1 = theta/10;
polarscatter(theta,rho1,5,rho1,'filled')

[Christopher Miles]

Yeah, this looks good. Much thanks!