Add custom legend without any relation to the graph

Question

I wish to insert a legend that is not related to the graph whatsoever:

figure;
hold on;
plot(0,0,\'or\');
plot(0,0,\'ob\');
plot(0,0,\'ok\');
leg = legend(\'         


        

Answer 1

Your question is a little unclear. However, the first thing I thought of when reading it was the text function in Matlab.

You can use the text function to add text to a Matlab figure. It's use is

>> text(x, y, str);

where x and y are the coordinates in the figure where you want to add the text str. You can use the Color option of text for colours and TeX to draw lines or even _. I've gotten very creative with plots using text.

Here's a quick and dirty example of emulating a legend with text

x = 0:pi/20:2*pi;
y = sin(x);
plot(x,y)
axis tight

legend('sin(x)');

text(5.7, 0.75, 'sin(x)');
text(5.1, 0.78, '_____', 'Color', 'blue');

which produces

             

For this specific case you could use the specific command (noted by @Hoki in the comments).

ht = text(5, 0.5, {'{\color{red} o } Red', '{\color{blue} o } Blue', '{\color{black} o } Black'}, 'EdgeColor', 'k');

to produce

             

by retrieving the handle to the text object it becomes trivial to copy it to a new figure, copyobj(ht, newfig). [1]