The way cprintf is implemented relies on manipulating the command window in a way that simply cannot be done for a parallel worker. However, you can work around this by sending the stuff to be printed back to the client, and getting it to call cprintf while the parfor loop proceeds. Use a DataQueue to acheive this:
q = parallel.pool.DataQueue;
% Set up 'q' so that it calls 'cprintf' every time it receives a message
afterEach(q, @(args) cprintf(args{:}));
parfor idx = 1:10
% instead of calling 'cprintf' directly, send the arguments
% to 'cprintf' as a cell array
send(q, {'cyan', 'iteration: %d\n', idx});
end
