Why are Plot ticks increments inconsistently assigned?

When I create a simple x-y plot, I would expect that the ticks woiuld increase in size as the samples in my data would increase. And that seems to be mostly the case. If I do a plot([0,1], [0, 1.8]), then my y-axis has ticks spaced 0.2 apart. If I do a plot([0,1], [0, 2.1]), then my y-axis has ticks spaced 0.5 apart. However, the max value is between 1.4 and 1.5, the tick spacing is 0.5 instead of 0.2, so there are not many ticks shown on the plot. I created a script to show how the tick increment is inconsistent.

Is this a bug, or is there some reason for this?

lim = logspace(log10(1), log10(10), 200)';

tick = zeros(length(lim), 1);
for n=1:length(lim)
    p=plot([0,1], [0, lim(n)]); % create a simple plot with two points
    tick(n) = p.Parent.YTick(2); % save the tick size
end

p=loglog(lim, tick);
xlabel('Max plot line value');
ylabel('Tick increment');
grid on
p.Parent.XTick = [1;1.4;1.5;2;5;10];
p.Parent.XTickLabel = arrayfun(@num2str, p.Parent.XTick, 'UniformOutput', false);
p.Parent.YTick = [0.1;0.2;0.5;1];
p.Parent.YTickLabel = arrayfun(@num2str, p.Parent.YTick, 'UniformOutput', false);

Answer 1

[Sanjana]

Hi Glenn,

As per the official documentation, there is no default spacing for ticks, but you can specify the spacing as per requirement using “xticks” and “yticks” properties of “Axes” in MATLAB.

These properties allow you to explicitly declare the location of the ticks along the respective axis.

Please refer to the following links, for further information,

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/326621-how-can-i-specify-axis-spacing#accepted_answer_256095

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/xticks.html#bu6jwmu-ticks

Hope this helps!