Colorbar not appearing in (surface) plot - LaTeX interpreter issue

Question

As the title states, the colorbar in surface plots does not appear when the default interpreter is set to 'latex'. This occurs in MATLAB 2012b and 2013a and on two different machines.

Precisely, the colorbar object is created, can be clicked when editing the plot, can be edited using the interactive colorbar editor but is not visible at all. It does not appear when saved as a figure and reopened, saved as a PNG, exported in .eps format or saved as a .pdf.

After searching around, I found the following post from 2011, concerning MATLAB 7: http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7518470

Specifically, the interpreter appears to be at fault, when it is set to 'latex', the colorbar will not display. When set to the default, it does.

Here is the smallest demonstrating example.

set(0,'defaulttextinterpreter','none');
figure;
surf(peaks(100)); colorbar
set(0,'defaulttextinterpreter','latex');
figure
surf(peaks(100)); colorbar

The two figures are identical except that the colorbar is visible only in the first figure.

I use a lot of special characters and sub/superscripts in my plots so in startup.m I set the default interpreter to 'latex'. I could surround all calls to colorbar with:

 set(0,'defaulttextinterpreter','none');    
 colorbar;
 set(0,'defaulttextinterpreter','latex');

But this is probably the least elegant solution possible. Can anyone shed some light on this issue which appears to be extant for over 5 years and multiple editions of MATLAB?

Answer 1

This behaviour is gone in Matlab R2014b, which uses an entirely new graphics engine, hg2. The plots look different (most of the time in a better way), but instead of old, documented bugs, there are now new, undocumented bugs...

Earlier versions of Matlab support somewhat experimental stages of hg2. You can enable these by running Matlab with the switch "-hgVersion 2". You can do this, for example, by editing the Desktop shortcut to point to something like "C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2013b\bin\matlab.exe" -hgVersion 2.

Unfortunately, with the new graphics engine being the default in Matlab2014b, the old bugs are less likely to be fixed in the future. I wish I could help you in a better way, but the workaround you posted seems like a good solution, especially if you wrap it in a function called robust_colorbar or so.

Answer 2

I can reproduce the problem on my system (R2010b, Windows Vista 32 bits) . It seems to be solved by changing the 'Renderer' property of the figure from the default 'OpenGL' to either 'painters' or 'zbuffer'. So, you can either change the renderer when creating the figure:

set(0, 'defaulttextinterpreter', 'latex');
figure('Renderer', 'zbuffer') %// this line changed
surf(peaks(100)); colorbar

or change the default renderer to be used for all figures (so you don't need to change it in every figure):

set(0, 'DefaultFigureRenderer', 'zbuffer'); %// this line added
set(0, 'defaulttextinterpreter', 'latex');
figure
surf(peaks(100)); colorbar

Using a renderer other than 'OpenGL' may affect features such as transparency or drawing speed. Here's some information about pros and cons of each renderer.