Customise colorbar labels (exponent)

Hello everyone, I have a problem with setting up a colorbar for a coloured contour plot. For matter of coherence with overlying contour lines, I would like the labels of the ticks of the colorbar expressed as 5, 10 and 15 * 10^10 and not 0.5, 1 and 1.5 *10^11. In other words, I would like "x 10^10" above the numbers of the ticks in place of "x 10^11" as now appears (see image) (and not other solutions like "e10" after each single tick label).

Now my code is just

c = colorbar;
c.Ticks=[-15*10^10:5*10^10:15*10^10];

Thank you to whoever will be able to answer my question.

Answer 1

[dpb]

@Star Strider is on the right track; the colorbar numeric ruler handle is hidden, however, but it is there and writeable --

For your example above, use

c=colorbar;
c.Ruler.Exponent=10;                   % set the desired exponent
c.Ruler.TickLabelFormat='%0.1f';       % fix up ugly default %g formatting

To illustrate with an example modified from the doc, first use a default colorbar forcing a big exponent

surf(peaks/1E11)
hCB=colorbar;

Then, fixup the exponent as desired to see the difference...

surf(peaks/1E11)
c=colorbar;
c.Ruler.Exponent=-10;                   % set the desired exponent
c.Ruler.TickLabelFormat='%0.1f';        % fix up ugly default %g formatting

Search for Yair Altman's FEX submittal to retrieve undocumented/hidden object handles.

[Matteo Migone]

Very helpful! Thank you so much!