How can I specify to which figure a plot should go?

Question

I have multiple figures open, and I want to update them independently during runtime. The following toy example should clarify my intention:

clf;

figure(\'name         


        

Answer 1

You can specify the axes-object in the plot-command. See here:

http://www.mathworks.de/help/techdoc/ref/plot.html

So, open a figure, insert the axes, save the id of the axes object, and then plot into it:

figure
hAx1 = axes;
plot(hAx1, 1, 1, '*r')
hold on

figure
hAx2 = axes;
plot(hAx2, 2, 1, '*r')
hold on


plot(hAx2, 3, 4, '*b')
plot(hAx1, 3, 3, '*b')

Alternatively, you can use gca instead of creating the axes object yourself (because it's automatically created within the actual figure, when it doesn't exist!)

figure
plot(1,1)
hAx1 = gca;
hold on

figure
plot(2,2)

plot(hAx1, 3, 3)

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See the following hierarchy representing the relationship between figures and axes

From http://www.mathworks.de/help/techdoc/learn_matlab/f3-15974.html.