Mathematical Symbols, Greek Letters, and TEX Characters

Graphics

Mathematical Symbols, Greek Letters, and TEX Characters

You can include mathematical symbols and Greek letters in text using T_EX-style character sequences. This section describes how to construct a T_EX character sequence.

Two Levels of TEX Support

MATLAB provides two levels of T_EX support, controlled by the text Interpreter property.

tex -- Support for a subset of T_EX markup

latex -- Support T_EX and LaT_EX markup

If you do not want the characters interpreted as T_EX markup, then set the interpreter property to none.

Available Symbols and Greek Letters

For a list of symbols and the character sequences used to define them, see the table of available T_EX characters in the Text Properties reference page.

In general, you can define text that includes symbols and Greek letters using the text function, assigning the character sequence to the String property of text objects. You can also include these character sequences in the string arguments of the title, xlabel, ylabel, and zlabel commands.

Example -- Using a Mathematical Expression to Title a Graph

This example uses T_EX character sequences to create graph labels. The following statements add a title and x- and y-axis labels to an existing graph.

title('{\itAe}^{-\alpha\itt}sin\beta{\itt} \alpha<<\beta')
xlabel('Time \musec.')
ylabel('Amplitude')

The backslash character (\) precedes all T_EX character sequences. Looking at the string defining the title illustrates how to use these characters.

Controlling the Interpretation of TEX Characters

The text Interpreter property controls the interpretation of T_EX characters. If you set this property to none, MATLAB interprets the special characters literally.

Editing Text Objects Using Character and Numeric Variables in Text