Setting default Figure font, different from Desktop

I'm trying to set the default figure font independent of the desktop font, however this doesn't seem to be possible in the 'preferences' section. Is it possible to set the desktop font to Helvetica, while setting the default figure fonts to Arial?

Answer 1

[Daniel Shub]

There is a nice blog post about this over at undocumentedmatlab. Basically you do

set(0, 'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Arial');
set(0, 'DefaultTextFontName', 'Arial');

You can add this to your startup.m, but it is a little dangerous. I would suggest limiting the effects to a single figure at a time.

figure;
set(gcf, 'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Arial');
set(gcf, 'DefaultTextFontName', 'Arial');

You could create your own function

function h = arialfigure
  h = figure;
  set(h, 'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Arial');
  set(h, 'DefaultTextFontName', 'Arial');
end