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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T12:36:19+00:00

I am programming a basic GUI in MATLAB that utilizes the mapping toolbox. The

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I am programming a basic GUI in MATLAB that utilizes the mapping toolbox. The GUI will display a grayscale image and then plot discrete points over the data, all of this over the necessary map projection. It is important that I plot onto map axes (those created by the axesm command) rather than the vanilla cartesian space. I have no problem doing all this from the command line, but I cannot find a way to implement a GUI version and its driving me nuts.

The problem is that I need to specify the map axes as being the child of the parent figure. The normal axes has a property that can be set, doing something like:

axesHandle = axes('Parent', parentHandle, ...);

or

set(axesHandle, 'Parent', parentHandle);

However, there is no equivalent parent property for the map axes created by the axesm function, so I have no way to manipulate the axes within the figure. How can I do this?

Update: If I create a plot within the map axes in an empty figure, get(figureHandle, ‘Children’) returns the handle of the axesm object (thanks @slayton!), so the map axes object must be implicitly added to the children of the figure by MATLAB.

Should I be concerned that the map axes do not refer back to the parent figure, or should I just let it be? I wonder if this is a classic case of MATLAB forcing me to not comply with the standards the manual tells me to implement.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After much trial and error and reading of documentation, I have found that there is no way to explicitly specify the parent of the map axes. Instead, they are implicitly added on top of the current axes. In the instance that no axes exist in the current figure, calling axesm creates an axes object and then places the axesm object inside. When you take this route, you have to grab the axes object handle by calling gca:

    mapAxesHandle = axesm(...);
axesHandle = gca(...);

    This makes it frustrating to use the mapping toolbox when writing a GUI from scratch, but that’s the way Mathworks makes it happen. Thanks to @slayton for useful info. I’d upvote but my reputation is <15 🙁

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