# Generating arbitrary colored tick labels

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Leo Simon on 17 Apr 2020
Commented: dpb on 17 Apr 2020
From this thread I learned from @FrankZalkow how to assign different colors to different tick labels. (I needed to use xticklabel_rotate to do this, because by default matlab just destroys the ticks, but I can live with this.) I want to extend his approach to produce arbitrarily colored labels. From the manual xcolors.sty, I learned how to insert into the \color{} command an arbitrary set of colors, i.e., \color{rgb:red,X;green,Y;yellow,Z} This does the trick in latex, but it doesn't work in matlab. Here's an mwe. If you set n=2 and run the code, you see a couple of colored \lambda's, but when n=3 it doesn't work. Can somebody suggest how to make it work please?
As a side question, I'm curious why even with n=2, it doesn't work without using xticklabel_rotate. Thanks for any advice.
n=3;
plot(1:n);
XTickLabel{1} = '\color{red} \lambda' ;
XTickLabel{2} = '\color{blue} \lambda' ;
if n==3;
XTickLabel{3} = '\color{rbg:red,5;green,6;yellow,1} \lambda' ;
end
set(gca,'XTick',[1:n]);
set(gca,'XTickLabel',XTickLabel);
xticklabel_rotate([],90)

Tommy on 17 Apr 2020
Is TeX an option for you?
n=10;
plot(1:n);
labels = cell(n,1);
for i=1:n
labels{i} = sprintf('\\color[rgb]{%f, %f, %f}%s', [rand rand rand], '\lambda');
end
set(gca,'XTick',1:n);
set(gca,'XTickLabel',labels);
Note that this requires rgb values, with each value between 0 and 1.
Also: what is xticklabel_rotate? Whatever it is, the above works for me without it.
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dpb on 17 Apr 2020
The property X|Y|ZTickLabelRotation has existed at least since HG2 (R2014a/b?).
Functions x|y|ztickangle were added in R2016b