Using errorbar() with semilogy() in MATLAB?

Question

I'd like to plot data x & y with errorbars, ebar, and its fit, yfitted, on a semilog plot. This doesn't seem to work:

figure;
hold on;
errorbar(x,y,ebar);
semilogy(x,yfitted);

Instead of semilog plot I get a linear plot. What should I be doing differently?

Aldwon

Answer 1

try

h = errorbar(x,y,ebar);
set(get(h,'Parent'), 'YScale', 'log')

or

ax = axes();
errorbar(ax, x,y,ebar);
set(ax, 'YScale', 'log');

Discrown

sort of works but it screws all of the errorbars up.. e.g. it fails to draw some of the vertical lines – Aldwon

As you probably realize, you can't take the log of 0 or a negative number – Discrown

Answer 2

This is what the documentation says.

"If you attempt to add a loglog, semilogx, or semilogy plot to a linear axis mode graph with hold on, the axis mode will remain as it is and the new data will plot as linear"

I would suggest that you just reverse the order of your plotting, that is.

semilogy(x,yfitted);
hold on;
errorbar(x,y,ebar);

Diametral

It should work. Are you writing >>figure; >>hold on; before using semilogy? If you do, it wont work. Just write the three lines in my post and you'll get the same result as the answer above. – Diametral

I got this solution to work on 2010a, so +1, but it's more direct and generalizable to set axis properties directly than to worry about what matlab freezes with the hold command – Discrown