In MTEX you can plot almost any type data. Simply apply the plot command to any variable and MTEX tries to plot the content of the variable in the most intuitive way. In this way, you can plot three Miller indices, rotations, pole figures, or ODFs. MTEX also offers you a wide range of possibilities to customize your plots, e.g. by changing the plot style, the spherical projection, the color coding, or by adding colorbars or other annotations to the plot. You can even combine plots of different ODFs or EBSD data. This way MTEX allows you to create publication-ready plots which can be exported to almost any format using the commands saveFigure.
Plot Types
In general, MTEX knows the following plot types
- contour plots
- filled contour plots
- smoots plots
- scatter plots
- line plots
Contour plots are plots consisting only of contour lines and mainly used for pole figure or ODF plots. For raw pole figure data, MTEX uses by default a plot where each datapoint is represented by a single dot colored accordingly to the intensity. Line plots are used by MTEX for one- dimensional ODF plots, plots of Fourier coefficients and plots of kernel functions
Spherical Projections
Whenever MTEX plots pole figures, ODFs, or crystal or specimen directions MTEX uses spherical projections to map the spherical data to the plane. By doing so MTEX supports a wide variety of spherical projections, i.e.,
- equal area projection (Schmidt)
- equal distance projection
- equal angle projection (stereographic)
- plain
- 3d plots
Color Coding
A central issue when interpreting plots is to have a consistent color coding among all plots. In MTEX this can be achieved in two ways. If the minimum and maximum values are known then one can use one of the following syntaxes to have a consistent color coding.
- Specifying the colorrange
- Setting a logarithmic color scale
- Switching to a monochrome color scale * See also Spatial EBSD Plots.
Plot Annotations
After generating a plot with MTEX it is possible to modify it interactively using the MATLAB plotting tools in the plotting figure. This includes
- adding a colorbar
- adding a legend
- adding annotations
- resizing / shifting parts of the plot
This is described in more detail here.
Combined Plots
Sometimes it is useful to combine several plots, e.g. plotting on the top of an inverse pole figure some important crystal directions. This can be performed by the command hold all, which preserves MATLAB from replacing the old plot by the new one. This technique is described in more detail here.
Exporting Plots
Plots generated by MTEX can be exported to a wide range of formats using the MATLAB function save as in the figure menu or using the command saveFigure