Writing a function including text keep getting an error

Hi,

I'm trying to write a function that plots a set of points. I wrote a script and it all worked fine, and now I'm in the process of decomposing my script into functions. Then I have taken the bit for plotting the text and tried to put it into a function, but I keep getting an error message about how I've used text.

But I don't understand what I've done wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I've included my code, function and error below

Code which works fine:

x=[2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4];
y=[2, 5, 8, 2, 5, 8, 2, 5, 8];
    x1= x+5;  
    x2= x1(1:6);
    y2= y(1:6);
    x3=x1(7:9);
    y3=y(7:9);

i=1:5;
%define character variable
img=char('a', 'b', 'c', 'd' ,'e');
imz=char('f','g','h','i','j');

       figure(i)
      %set axes to show size
      axis([0 10 0 12])
      text(x,y,img(i))
      %second rectangle with a mix
      text(x2,y2, imz(i))
      hold on;
      text(x3,y3, 'm')
      %draw rectangle
      myrectangle = rectangle('Position', [1, 1 ,4, 8], 'EdgeColor', [0 0 0]);
      myrectangle1 = rectangle('Position', [6, 1 ,4, 8], 'EdgeColor', [0 0 0]);

This is the function

function place_letter
    i=1:5;
    x=[2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4]; %box1
    y=[2, 5, 8, 2, 5, 8, 2, 5, 8]; %box1
    x1= x+5;  %box 2
    x2= x1(1:6); %box 2
    y2= y(1:6); %box 2
    x3=x1(7:9); %box 2
    y3=y(7:9); %box 2

      img=char('a', 'b', 'c', 'd' ,'e');
      imz=char ('f','g','h','i','j');

          axis([0 10 0 12]) %set axes to show size
          axis on
          text(x,y, img(i))
          text(x2,y2,imz(i))
          text(x3,y3, 'm')

These are my error messasges

 *Error using text
Each string specified must have a corresponding set of coordinates

 Error in place_letter (line 16)
        text(x,y, img(i))

 Error in Images (line 8)
      place_letter*

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Alice - I think that you are missing a for loop from each block of your code (this sort of seems true due to the indenting of your above code). The first block fails with the error

 Error using figure
 Single input must be an existing figure handle or a scalar integer from 1 to 2147483646

because of how the local variable i is initialized and then used

 i=1:5;

 % other code

 figure(i)

You should have your loop doing something like

 for k=1:5
     figure(k);
     % etc.
 end

I replaced the i with k as the index variable since MATLAB uses i and j as representations of the imaginary number.

In your function place_letter, you are missing that same for loop and the call to figure, so the error (from above which you observed) occurs because i is an array of five elements, and you are using this local variable at

 text(x,y, img(i))

where img(1:5) is a column vector of 5 strings whereas you seem to just want a single character/letter. Try using a for loop here too so that a single character is placed at each iteration of the loop on different figures.

However, if you are trying to place a string of characters and not a single character, say 'abcdef', then transpose the column vector to a row vector using the apostrophe. i.e.

 text(x,y,img');