> Is there a better way to merge plots systematically?
The color of the lines and markers in your plots were intentionally set so when those objects are copied to another figure, their colors and other set properties are maintained. From what I understand, you'd like to merge the objects from both figures into a new figure but without resulting in duplicate colors.
I noticed there is color grouping in each of the two figures. Small points have the same colors as lines and errorbars. I assume these color groupings are important. The solution below copies all objects to a 3rd figure while maintaining the color groupings. It assigns color based on the axes default ColorOrder.
It works for your figures containing lines and errorbar objects but might meed firtjer customization if there are other objects within the axes.
Original Figures
New combined figure
See inline comments for details.
% Define the two figure files that are on the MATLAB path
% These are the only "inputs" to this script
f1 = 'logicalapproach_P2L1_Food Deprivation.fig';
f2 = 'logicalapproach_P2L1_Pre-Feeding.fig';
% Open the figures
fig1 = openfig(f1);
fig2 = openfig(f2);
% get axes handles - this assumes there is only 1 axes per figure!
fig1ax = gca(fig1);
fig2ax = gca(fig2);
leg = findobj(fig2,'Type','legend');
% Get axis children
fig1axChildren = get(fig1ax,'Children');
fig2axChildren = get(fig2ax,'Children');
% Create new fig, copy items from fig 1
% This will maintain set properties such as color
figFinal = figure();
ax = axes(figFinal);
h1 = copyobj(fig1axChildren, ax);
% Reset color but maintain color groups
recolorgroups(h1)
% Copy items from fig 2
h2 = copyobj(fig2axChildren, ax);
% Reset color but maintain color groups
recolorgroups(h2)
% Add legend to same location as the legend in fig2
% but only include objects with a defined DisplayName
h = [h1;h2];
hasDisplayName = ~cellfun('isempty',get(h,'DisplayName'));
legend(ax, h(hasDisplayName),'Location', leg.Location)
% Add title
title(ax,"Combined plot")
% Copy axis labels
xlabel(ax, fig2ax.XLabel.String)
ylabel(ax, fig2ax.YLabel.String)
function recolorgroups(objs)
% objs is a vector of objects
% ax is the parent axes
% Group new objects by color
objColors = cell2mat(get(objs,'color'));
[~, groups, groupID] = unique(objColors,'rows');
% For each color group, set 1 member to use the next series index and set
% the other members to the same series index value.
for i = 1:numel(groups)
hh = objs(groupID == groups(i));
set(hh,'ColorMode','auto');
set(hh(2:end),'SeriesIndex', hh(1).SeriesIndex)
set(hh,{'MarkerFaceColor'},get(hh,'color'));
end
end
