Changing Fonts Size in Matlab Plots

Question

I want to change Font Size for xlabel, ylabel, axis size, legend font size a.k.a everything at once, is this possible? By default, font is Helvetic

Answer 1

Jonas's answer does not change the font size of the axes. Sergeyf's answer does not work when there are multiple subplots.

Here is a modification of their answers that works for me when I have multiple subplots:

set(findall(gcf,'type','axes'),'fontsize',30)
set(findall(gcf,'type','text'),'fontSize',30) 

Answer 2

Jonas's answer is good, but I had to modify it slightly to get every piece of text on the screen to change:

set(gca,'FontSize',30,'fontWeight','bold')

set(findall(gcf,'type','text'),'FontSize',30,'fontWeight','bold')

Answer 3

It's possible to change default fonts, both for the axes and for other text, by adding the following lines to the startup.m file.

% Change default axes fonts.
set(0,'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Times New Roman')
set(0,'DefaultAxesFontSize', 14)

% Change default text fonts.
set(0,'DefaultTextFontname', 'Times New Roman')
set(0,'DefaultTextFontSize', 14)

If you don't know if you have a startup.m file, run

which startup

to find its location. If Matlab says there isn't one, run

userpath

to know where it should be placed.

Answer 4

To change the default property for your entire MATLAB session, see the documentation on how default properties are handled.

As an example:

set(0,'DefaultAxesFontSize',22)
x=1:200; y=sin(x);
plot(x,y)
title('hello'); xlabel('x'); ylabel('sin(x)')

Answer 5

If you want to change font size for all the text in a figure, you can use findall to find all text handles, after which it's easy:

figureHandle = gcf;
%# make all text in the figure to size 14 and bold
set(findall(figureHandle,'type','text'),'fontSize',14,'fontWeight','bold')

Answer 6

If anyone was wondering how to change the font sizes without messing around with the Matlab default fonts, and change every font in a figure, I found this thread where suggests this:

set(findall(fig, '-property', 'FontSize'), 'FontSize', 10, 'fontWeight', 'bold')

findall is a pretty handy command and in the case above it really finds all the children who have a 'FontSize' property: axes lables, axes titles, pushbuttons, etc.

Hope it helps.