I believe the issues here have been addressed in other reports that added more input validation to the quiver functions. On the current stable branch all of the examples in this report seem to fail with an appropriate error message or at least a call to print_usage().  closing as fixed.

Priority 1: Update documentation to refer to the 4-argument input form, and remove the 3-input form.  Update the text to more accurately describe what is going on.

Priority 2: Update input validation to handle 4-argument input form.  Test code which must pass.

z = peaks (25);
surf (z);
hold on;
[u, v, w] = surfnorm (z / 10);
h = quiver3 (z, u, v, w);

Currently this fails with

error: __quiver__: operator +: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 15625x1, op2 is 625x1)
error: called from
    __quiver__ at line 197 column 10
    quiver3 at line 87 column 10

Changed the Release to refer to the development branch.  Although, as a documentation and bug fix it can be backported to stable.

I have a version that now works, but!
Because it has to make up the x,y and z numbers,
the x and y are easy but what to do with the z?
at the moment my version draws the 3d arrows on a flat surface in the z. the arrows can point at any direction in 3d but are all starting on a flat surface in z. I don't know of any other way to make this work.

withe the 4th input being the z height then it would not be on a flat surface.

This could never have worked in the past ( and we had no complaints !)
Any Thoughts?

I don't think the 3-argument form is Matlab compatible, however, after looking at https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/quiver3.html.

The Octave documentation seems like it is simply describing the interface incorrectly. There is no 3-argument form, and the 6-argument form requires x,y,z to have the same dimensions as u,v,w, so they cannot be the output of a 3-nargout call to meshgrid.

There is a 4-argument form that is not documented in Octave's doc string at all, where X and Y are implied and Z defines the surface on which the vector field is plotted.

So going back to the example in Octave's doc string, this should not be expected to work:

[x, y, z] = peaks (25);
[u, v, w] = surfnorm (x, y, z / 10);
quiver3 (u, v, w);

But this should work, and currently fails in Octave:

quiver3 (z, u, v, w);

The help screen says that it can take 3 inputs
: quiver3 (u, v, w)

but it does not work.
If we take the example from the help documentation

1[x, y, z] = peaks (25);
surf (x, y, z);
hold on;
[u, v, w] = surfnorm (x, y, z / 10);
h = quiver3 (x, y, z, u, v, w);
set (h, "maxheadsize", 0.33);

it works. But now to test the three input mode try:
h = quiver3 (u, v, w);

this errors with a very unusual error message:


stopped in /usr/local/share/octave/5.0.1/m/plot/draw/quiver3.m at line 81
81:   oldfig = [];
debug>
error: _quiver_: operator +: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 15625x1, op2 is 625x1)
error: called from
    _quiver_ at line 197 column 10
    quiver3 at line 87 column 10
    testquiver3 at line 5 column 3