4.6 | 58 ratings Rate this file 540 downloads (last 30 days) File Size: 17.31 KB File ID: #278

arrow.m

by Erik Johnson

14 Jan 2000 (Updated 20 May 2009)

Code covered by the BSD License

Draw a line with an arrowhead.

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File Information
Description	ARROW (5/20/2009) Draw a line with an arrowhead. ARROW(Start,Stop) draws a line with an arrow from Start to Stop (points should be vectors of length 2 or 3, or matrices with 2 or 3 columns), and returns the graphics handle of the arrow(s). By itself, ARROW will use the mouse to allow selection. ARROW DEMO & ARROW DEMO2 show 3-D & 2-D demos of the capabilities of ARROW. ARROW PROPERTIES shows the properties that can be set (length, base angle, tip angle, width, which ends have arrowheads, etc.)
Acknowledgements	This submission has inspired the following: Random Boolean Network Toolbox, arrowflow, quiver2.m v1.2 (Nov 2009)
MATLAB release	MATLAB 6.5 (R13)
Zip File Content
Other Files	arrow.m, license.txt

Tags for This File
Everyone's Tags	annotation, arrow(2), arrowhead, customization, graphics, line, potw
Tags I've Applied
Add New Tags	Please login to tag files.

Comments and Ratings (61)
17 Dec 2002	a c	greatest function ever!
02 Feb 2003	Aslak Grinsted
17 Feb 2003	Niclas Borlin	Great!
01 May 2003	M Bakht	It is just great. Amazing.
03 Jul 2003	Jakob van de Laar	Great package, it should be incorporated in the standard Matlab distribution
12 Oct 2003	Benedikt Halldorsson	Neat package, but (unless I'm missing something obvious) renders itself essentially USELESS. Try setting the linestyle of the arrow line to dotted (set(h,'linestyle',':') and then try printing it out to a file (print -depsc test.eps) and view the postscript image. The line certainly is not dotted (on Matlab 6.5). Same problem with dashed and dot-dashed lines. I'm not sure if this is an arrow.m problem, or Matlab's.
05 Jan 2004	Bernhard Boeck	That's exactly what I'm looking for
24 Feb 2004	Arnd-Ragnar Rhiemeier	Excellent package. Help topics very comprehensive. Easy to use. Quickly leads to appealing graphical output. This package is exactly what I was looking for.
06 May 2004	ke wang	Very Useful and convenient. Easy to use!!
09 Jun 2004	Gerald Dalley	Very nice
26 Jul 2004	Kelvin Rocha	Very useful. Explanations are excellent. Exactly what I was looking for.
06 Oct 2004	Mattias Forsblom	Excellent.
06 Oct 2004	Eddie Fiorelli	Excellent work, thorough documentation. Thanks!
14 Oct 2004	Olivier Marsden	Very useful!
13 Dec 2004	Nathaniel de Lautour	Superb effort. Highly configurable, easy to use and well documented to boot.
16 Jan 2005	Rattikan Saelim
20 Feb 2005	Evan Westwood	Couldn't figure out how to make the arrow line and arrow head have a specific color. Arrowheads didn't look as nice as those you might plot in drawing/presentation packages such as Powerpoint.
02 May 2005	Ian Mackenzie
25 May 2005	Janik Zikovsky	Very good, better than annotation('arrow') because it is in axis units!
29 Jul 2005	Dave Cogdell	This code (specifincally including the documentation (which is at the same time incomplete and inadequate) is far too complex for the simple thing(s) it does. I believe the author is an engineer: he should refrain from trying to write like a computer scientist and write like an engineer.
29 Aug 2005	Changshun Deng	Good script!
13 Sep 2005	Amit Kesar	Very good. Thank you.
18 Sep 2005	Sharoni Shafir	Works great, thanks!
25 Sep 2005	Vijaykumar Sathyamurthi	Thanks for this excellent tool. I hope you continue writing such winderful codes!!!
22 Oct 2005	Shane Lin	I add the following comment at the file head. arrow(Start,Stop,'EdgeColor','b','FaceColor','b') color arrow.
15 Dec 2005	super tanne
06 Feb 2006	Very satisfied	Exactly what I needed. Perfect!
14 Feb 2006	Jasper Menger	Nicely done. A shame by the way Matlab doesn't seem to have a builtin function for drawing arrows from the command line.
14 Mar 2006	JR P	This is great. I hate how MATLAB uses normalized figure coordinates in their annotation() call for drawing arrows. It makes no sense and someone at MathWorks got lazy, so it becomes nearly useless. This code is exactly what they should have done.. good job Erik!
24 Aug 2006	heath kitson	thanks eric
09 Sep 2006	Nithya C.R.	The program is really great with all the aspects of plotting a directed line excellently covered.
04 Oct 2006	J Xu	this program is really good, easy-use. 3x Erik.
30 Oct 2006	Arun Karthi Subramaniyan	Great tool. Very easy to use with detailed documentation. Thanks for sharing it with us.
29 Dec 2006	Vassili Pastushenko	Good job. A small remark: arrow([0 0],[1 1],50,10,30) does not point to (0,1). Probably it would be reasonable to add a feature of automatical swapping baseAngle and tipAngle, if baseAngle < tipAngle.
29 Dec 2006	Vassili Pastushenko	does not point to (1,1)
18 Apr 2007	Ramesh Rajasekaran
22 Apr 2007	jonny e	Excellent and easy to use. I'd emphasize that one should call axis(axis) prior to plotting the arrow, or the axis limits will get reset which will render the arrow incorrectly. This is noted in the help, but tucked towards the bottom.
31 May 2007	B Gurt	Does exactly what it needs to do.
08 Aug 2007	Jorge Marin
04 Oct 2007	Dustin Kruse	works perfectly
09 Oct 2007	Rutty Bee	Ruins the figure when plotting 3-D arrows with z-components. In this case, the width of the arrowhead becomes so large that the plot is rendered unusable. This is the case no matter how one tries to set its size.
24 Oct 2007	Ahmet Sacan	Does not work when called in a deployed application (i.e., when called from the executable generated using mcc).
31 Oct 2007	Tuan Hoang	sorry, how to add this graphic handle (return value) to an existing axes, figure.
04 Feb 2008	Matthijs Klomp	Works great.
27 Apr 2008	Alex Fard
22 May 2008	Xuzhang Shen	good
10 Jun 2008	GDR! x	One can change the colour of an arrow by specifying 'FaceColor' and 'EdgeColor' properties, which is, unfortunately, not documented.
25 Jun 2008	Dmitry Vasilyev	OMG! Just exactly what I was looking for! Excellent job, thank you Eric!
02 Jul 2008	Joselito Dimayuga	the purpose of this Dir or format is for ?????
15 Jul 2008	lili kalmer
16 Aug 2008	Leonardo Duarte
29 Aug 2008	Saeed Taherion
30 Jan 2009	Ke	very useful.
10 Feb 2009	Hiram	to set the color of the arrow, see this example: axis([0 3 0 3 0 3]); grid on h=arrow([3 3 3],[0 0 0],36,'BaseAngle',60); set(h, 'FaceColor', 'b'); set(h, 'EdgeColor', 'r'); Awesome application!
16 Jun 2009	Jianbo	Excellent. One little problem is that the arrow created is a little different from the one inserted manually through the "insert" menu. For example, the position can not be adjust by mouse.
20 Jul 2009	Gabriel Akira Schreiber	The arrowheads look distorted. Even the arrowheads in the demo look distorted.
07 Oct 2009	never change	amazing,very useful
10 Nov 2009	Lorenzo Guerrasio	It looks really great...I'll start use instead of quiver!
15 Dec 2009	Aamir
27 Dec 2009	Aamir
17 Jan 2010	Rob Campbell	Useful in many ways but the code is very complicated and it's not clear how to attain specific effects without trawling through the function body. Why not put demo code in a separate file?

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Updates
20 May 2009	Replace "eval('trycmd','catchcmd')" with "try, trycmd; catch, catchcmd; end;", which break's compatibility with MATLAB 5 but improves compliance with newer versions.
20 May 2009	actually update the file (not just the description); correct view on demo

Tag Activity for this File
Tag	Applied By	Date/Time
annotation	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
customization	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
arrow	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
arrowhead	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
graphics	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
line	Erik Johnson	22 Oct 2008 06:35:15
potw	Shari Freedman	29 May 2009 09:23:55
arrow	Yang Bai	28 Oct 2009 06:19:07

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