from the desk of stinkpot

force a number of tick marks in a matlab plot

February 20th, 2008 by Lawrence David

matlab will automatically calculate how many tick marks produce the most pleasing axes in a plot.  however, if you know better, you can override these settings by commanding:

>> set(gca,’XTick’,[1:tick_number])

Posted in Matlab | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “force a number of tick marks in a matlab plot”

1. on 27 Nov 2012 at 7:06 am   Wauzl

   Sorry to say this, but you really got this wrong: XTick sets the location of the ticks, not the number of ticks. If you do
   >> plot(-3,-2)
   >> set(gca,’XTick’,1:3)
   you won’t see any ticks on the x-axis, because Matlab tries to make ticks at x=1,2,3. But this is not visible in the current plot, so no ticks are produced.