Question

How do you connect two points such as (1,1) and (2,2) using a wavy line instead of a straight line in Matlab?

I have looked at the function line([1 2],[1 2]) but it does not provide such functionality.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Like @Nzbuu said, it’s hard to know what you want your wavy line to look like. The following function will plot a sinusoid on your current figure between the 2 points, with periods and amplitude specified. If your definition of wavy is different than mine, just change xx and yy to describe your wavy line between [0,0] and [1,1].

function wavyline(pt1, pt2) 
% first, create a "unit" wavy line segment
xx = [0:.01:1];
reps = 5 % how many periods of sine you want
widthRatio = 0.2 % height of peaks / lenght of line
yy = (widthRatio/2)*sin(reps*xx*2*pi);

% stretch our unit wavy line to be the proper length
dx = pt2(1) - pt1(1);
dy = pt2(2) - pt1(2);
len = sqrt(dx*dx+dy*dy);
xx = len*xx;

% now rotate it
th = atan2(dy, dx);
R = [cos(th), -sin(th); sin(th), cos(th)];
rotatedPts = R * [xx;yy];

% finally, shift it to start at pt1, and plot
shiftedPts = rotatedPts + [pt1(1); pt1(2)] * ones(size(xx));
plot(shiftedPts(1,:), shiftedPts(2,:),'k')

end