15.3.3.4 Legend Properties

Properties of legend objects (see legend):

autoupdate: "off" | {"on"}

Control whether the number of legend items is updated automatically when objects are added to (or deleted from) the peer axes. For example:

## Create a single plot with its legend.
figure ();
plot (1:10);
legend ("Slope 1");
## Add another plot and specify its displayname so that
## the legend is correctly updated.
hold on;
plot ((1:10) * 2, "displayname", "Slope 2");
## Stop automatic updates for further plots.
legend ("autoupdate", "off");
plot ((1:10) * 3);

box: "off" | {"on"}

Control whether the legend has a surrounding box.

color: colorspec, def. [1 1 1]

Color of the legend background. See colorspec.

edgecolor: colorspec, def. [0.1500 0.1500 0.1500]

Control the color of the legend outline.

fontangle: "italic" | {"normal"}

Control whether the font is italic or normal.

fontname: string, def. "*"

Name of font used for text rendering. When setting this property, the text rendering engine will search for a matching font in your system. If none is found then text is rendered using a default sans serif font (same as the default "*" value).

Programming Note: On systems that don’t use FontConfig natively (all but Linux), the font cache is built when Octave is installed. You will need to run system ("fc-cache -fv") manually after installing new fonts.

fontsize: scalar, def. 9

Size of the font used for text rendering. See fontunits property.

fontunits: "centimeters" | "inches" | "normalized" | "pixels" | {"points"}

Units used to interpret the "fontsize" property.

fontweight: "bold" | {"normal"}

Control the variant of the base font used for text rendering.

location: "best" | "bestoutside" | "east" | "eastoutside" | "none" | "north" | {"northeast"} | "northeastoutside" | "northoutside" | "northwest" | "northwestoutside" | "south" | "southeast" | "southeastoutside" | "southoutside" | "southwest" | "southwestoutside" | "west" | "westoutside"

Control the location of the legend.

numcolumns: scalar interger, def. 1

Control the number of columns used in the layout of the legend items. For example:

figure ();
plot (rand (30));
legend ("numcolumns", 3);

Setting numcolumns also forces the numcolumnsmode property to be set to "manual".

orientation: "horizontal" | {"vertical"}

Control whether the legend items are arranged vertically (column-wise) or horizontally (row-wise).

position: four-element vector

Specify the position of the legend excluding its title. The four elements of the vector are the coordinates of the lower left corner and width and height of the legend. Changing this property also switches the "location" to "none".

string: string | cell array of strings

List of labels for the legend items. For example:

figure ();
plot (rand (20));
## Let legend choose names automatically
hl = legend ();
## Selectively change some names
str = get (hl, "string");
str(1:5:end) = "Garbage";
set (hl, "string", str);

textcolor: colorspec, def. [0 0 0]

Control the color of the text strings for legend items.

title: graphics handle

Graphics handle of the title text object.

units: "centimeters" | "characters" | "inches" | {"normalized"} | "pixels" | "points"

Units used to interpret the "position", property.