volumeViewer does not offer any kind of data cursor, and makes it difficult to get to the graphics components. I revisited some notes I have about the graphics structures of volumeViewer, and did some more tests, and I find that the main graphics area in volumeViewer does not have an axes and therefore cannot have the axes tools turned on.
Some of the graphics objects for volumeViewer break some of the rules, such as it having a hgtransform that is a direct parent of a uipanel, whereas normally a hgtransform needs to be a child of an axes.
