how to remove argument labels from polar plot in MATLAB

Question

Does anyone know a simple way to remove the labels from the argument axis in a polar plot in MATLAB? My figures are small and I have to zoom in to see them, but when I do this the argument labels from one subplot get in the way of the other subplots.

Equally, if anyone knows of a way to solve this issue by rescaling the axis in the radial direction, or of any solution for that matter, then I would be very grateful. For the mean time I'll have to trim and re-size in Latex.

I tried the method here

How to remove Rho labels from Matlab polar plot?

but it didn't work.

here is some sample code

    subplot(1,3,1,'align');
    r = 10;
       polar(t,abs((r.*exp(t.*1i) - (1+1i)).^2));

      set(gca, 'fontsize', 20)
     set(findall(gca, 'String', '0'),'String', ' ') %remove theta labels
     hold on

PLease, provide some sample code that reproduces the problem. — Oleg

Oleg Oleg · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-29T18:54:20

Given the following example input:

t = 0:.01:2*pi;
polar(t,sin(2*t).*cos(2*t),'--r')

enter image description here

You can remove the vertical labels (along rho) by keeping only the legit ones.

% Find all handles to text labels
h     = findall(gca,'type','text');

% Define what to keep
legit = {'0','30','60','90','120','150','180','210','240','270','300','330','360',''};

% Take the others and set them to empty string
idx   = ~ismember(get(h,'string'),legit);
set(h(idx),'string','')

EDIT addressing comments

One approach would be simply setting to empty string '' those labels defined IN legit, i.e. by removing ~ near ismember. However, this approach is not robust in the sense that it will remove all of the labels that match. Suppose you have some other label with 120, then it will be removed as well.

One way to solve this issue is to edit polar() on line 155 and 162 by adding a 'Tag' to the radial annotations:

'HandleVisibility', 'off', 'Parent', cax,'Tag','spoke');

Then, save the edited function, plot, retrieve those text labels, and set to empty string:

h = findall(gca,'Type','text','-and','Tag','spoke');
set(h,'string','')

how to remove argument labels from polar plot in MATLAB

1 Answers