MATLAB Creating Graphical User Interfaces

10 Lay Out a Programmatic UI

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Other UI components, such as uicontrols, uitables, and uipanels have a Position

property, which you can use to set their location and size.

Units of Measure

The default units associated with the Position property depend on the component you are

placing. However, you can change the Units property to lay out your UI in the units of

your choice. There are six different units of measure to choose from: inches, centimeters,

normalized, points, pixels, and characters.

Always specify Units before Position for the most predictable results.

f = figure('Units','inches','Position',[4 3 6 5]);

Your choice of units can affect the appearance and resizing behavior of the UI:

• If you want the components inside the figure to scale proportionally with the figure
  when the user resizes the window, set the Units property of the components inside the
  figure to 'normalized'.


• If you are developing a cross-platform UI, then you can set the Units property to
  'points' or 'characters' to make the layout consistent across all platforms.


• There might be other situations in which you want to lay out your UI using
  nondefault units. For example, you might need to specify height and width values in
  inches in order to conform to a specification.


• When the value of the Units property is 'inches', 'centimeters', 'points',
  'pixels', or 'characters', the component does not scale with the figure when
  the user resizes the UI. To enable automatic scaling, set the Units property to
  'normalized' after the code that specifies the Position in the other units.

Example of a Simple Layout

Here is the code for a simple UI containing an axes and a button. To see how it works,

copy and paste this code into the editor and run it.

function myui

% Add the UI components

hs = addcomponents;