Copying selected lines to new figure?

I have a rather large number of data plots in several figures, collected together for ease of visual comparison, but I'd like to be able to pull one or several out at a time and copy them to a separate figure. For example the currently displayed ones only! (I can access the figure data to extract all lines, but I don't know how to point only at those that are currently displayed on the plot, and with several thousand, though usually only 10 or 20 displayed at a time, it gets time consuming).

In the past I've copied the whole figure and manually deleted all other lines, but this is extremely inefficient.

I had a hunt around but didn't see any tools for extracting plotted lines from figures to new figures and/or cell arrays directly though I'm guessing there is one out there? While I imagine its not that difficult, I've had problems in the past getting the data from figure, usually because I run into handle issues that I'm not quite capable of dealing with.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

I am not sure how you are controlling which plots are visible or not ?

Generally speaking, if an object's Visible property is 'on', and the same is true for all of its parents, then the object will be part of a figure (unless the object is currently hidden behind something else.)

If you are intending to refer to the objects that are visible by virtue of not being visibly covered up by something else, then the determination can be rather complex... especially if you are dealing with transparency.

[Shawn]

Sorry about that, I mean objects which have Visibility 'on'.

So the ones which I would like to copy to another figure are simply those objects, in this case line objects in the plot, which are visible (ie typically I cycle through them in the plot browser while looking at the plotted data and would like to save some of them to a separate figure readily).

If I copy the existing figure, of course the new one has all objects, including the invisible ones, perhaps a simpler question is can you copy only the visible objects in a figure?

[Walter Roberson]

copyobj( findobj(YourOldAxis, 'visible', 'on'), YourNewAxis )

[Shawn]

Great, thanks! I was momentarily confused because the findobj was also finding the axes themselves, and getting unhappy when copying, but I just added a line to it. Using the code below does what I want, not sure if its a bit clunky but it works for what I need.

currax = gca; %get the current axes (ie the plot to copy)
h1 = figure; % create a new figure/axes
ax1 = axes;
copyobj( findobj(currax, 'visible', 'on','type','line'), ax1 );

[Walter Roberson]

That should work.