Disable font smoothing in colorbar object

Hi everyone,

I am trying to produce a figure with the FontSmoothing property disabled throughout. The figure has one axes object with a title, two axis labels, two plot()'ted lines, a legend, and a colorbar. My problem is that I can't find a way to turn off font smoothing for the colorbar tick labels. The colorbar object does have a Label property which in turn has a FontSmoothing property, but turning that off only affects the colorbar label (as the name would suggest). The tick labels remain unaffected.

I have read other answers showing how to turn off font smoothing for legend objects (basically, you have to use the 4-output-argument form of legend()), but I could not find a way to do something similar for colorbar().

This is what I have been able to accomplish so far: (I am using MATLAB R2019a for Linux)

The colorbar tick labels ( -16.5 through -19.5 ) clearly have some sort font smoothing (font antialiasing) enabled. How can I disable that?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

cb = colorbar(appropriate_axes);
cb.Ruler.FontSmoothing = 'off';

[Vicky]

Thank you so much! This is perfect!

As a side question, why does the Ruler entry seem to be hidden from the user? When I enumerate the properties of the colorbar with:

k=findall(gcf(),'Type','colorbar');
get(k(1))

the Ruler entry is not listed. The documentation does not mention at all that this property exists for colorbars, either (R2019a Function Reference p.1/1729--1/1766; Graphics Guide p.10/2--10/9).

[Walter Roberson]

As a side question, why does the Ruler entry seem to be hidden from the user

I do not know; the decisions of Mathworks about what to expose and what not to expose are a mystery to me.

orderfields(struct(k(1)))       %you will probably get a warning about the struct()

[Vicky]

Your messages were really enlightening, thanks a lot!

Answer 2

[sushanth govinahallisathyanarayana]

You can use gca to get a handle to the current axes, after that you can use the properties of the axes to set accordingly.

[Walter Roberson]

No, the axes settings do not control the settings of the colorbar label.