How to create subplots with little vertical spacing?

179 vues (au cours des 30 derniers jours)
Sepp
Sepp le 13 Août 2015
Commenté : KAE le 20 Août 2021
Hello
I want to do a figure in Matlab consisting of a grid of images (subplots). I have used the subaxis toolbox :
subaxis(4,6,1, 'Spacing', 0.03, 'Padding', 0, 'Margin', 0);
The problem is that the vertical space between the subplots (images) is too big.
How can this be solved? The horizontal spacing is ok but I want the vertical spacing the same as the horizontal spacing. With the above toolbox this seems not working.
I'm also interested in other solutions than the mentioned toolbox.

Réponse acceptée

Kelly Kearney
Kelly Kearney le 13 Août 2015
The subaxis command allows you to specify different values for vertical and horizontal spacing. Try playing around with different values to get what you want. Remember that the spacing/padding/margins are defined in terms of normalized coordinates, so if your figure isn't square, the vertical and horizontal distances won't be quite the same.
For example, the following will give you very little vertical spacing:
iax = 1; % Or whichever
subaxis(4, 6, iax, 'sh', 0.03, 'sv', 0.01, 'padding', 0, 'margin', 0);
  7 commentaires
Sepp
Sepp le 15 Août 2015
I have tried it out. It works perfectly. Thank you so much for it.
Kelly Kearney
Kelly Kearney le 17 Août 2015
I've added a bunch of comments to the example above to walk you through exactly what each line does.

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Plus de réponses (2)

Cedric
Cedric le 13 Août 2015
Modifié(e) : Cedric le 13 Août 2015
You can store/use the axis handles of both subplots and access/modify their properties. Here is an example:
t = 0:0.1:10 ;
hAxis(1) = subplot( 2, 1, 1 ) ;
plot( t, sin(t) ) ;
hAxis(2) = subplot( 2, 1, 2 ) ;
plot( t, cos(t) ) ;
This produces:
Then you can access axes properties through their handles. E.g. for querying all available properties:
>> set( hAxis(1) )
ALim: {}
ALimMode: {'auto' 'manual'}
ActivePositionProperty: {'position' 'outerposition'}
...
Browsing all properties, you realize that the Position property is probably what you need to update. For getting a specific property, e.g. Position:
>> pos = get( hAxis(1), 'Position' )
pos =
0.1300 0.5838 0.7750 0.3412
where the first two coordinates are the horizontal and vertical relative (in [0,1]) coordinates of the origin of the axis with respect to the lower left corner of the figure, and the second two are the relative width and height. Say you want to make the first axis taller and closer to the second:
>> pos(2) = 0.5 ; % Shift down.
>> pos(4) = 0.45 ; % Increase height.
>> set( hAxis(1), 'Position', pos ) ;
and when you execute it, you get:
PS: I would favor this type of approache over 3rd party functions, because it is easy to learn using handles, and then you are really free to design almost whatever you want (e.g. small inserts in larger plots). For this purpose, the last thing that you need to know is the AXES function, which creates a new axes graphic object in a figure. To illustrate:
hAxis(3) = axes( 'Position', [0.66, 0.55, 0.2, 0.2] ) ;
[X,Y,Z] = peaks( 15 ) ;
surf( X, Y, Z);
adds the following insert:
  2 commentaires
Cedric
Cedric le 14 Août 2015
Modifié(e) : Cedric le 14 Août 2015
Last example, for the fun of it:
load clown ;
nRows = 3 ;
nCols = 5 ;
% - Create figure, set position/size to almost full screen.
figure() ;
set( gcf, 'Units', 'normalized', 'Position', [0.1,0.1,0.8,0.8] ) ;
% - Create grid of axes.
[blx, bly] = meshgrid( 0.05:0.9/nCols:0.9, 0.05:0.9/nRows:0.9 ) ;
hAxes = arrayfun( @(x,y) axes( 'Position', [x, y, 0.9*0.9/nCols, 0.9*0.9/nRows] ), blx, bly, 'UniformOutput', false ) ;
% - "Plot data", update axes parameters.
for k = 1 : numel( hAxes )
axes( hAxes{k} ) ;
image( X ) ;
set( gca, 'Visible', 'off' ) ;
end
colormap( map ) ;
Here you see that it takes 2 lines of code for defining your own grid of axes. It is easy to wrap this into a function of your own, which fills the axes with whatever you need to plot/display.
William Chamberlain
William Chamberlain le 5 Oct 2018
Modifié(e) : William Chamberlain le 5 Oct 2018
jump to use subaxis if you just need to get it done right now (which is generally when I'm Googling for answers), but definitely come back and learn this ASAP, because this is a better solution than subaxis : you can easily set things up literally any way you want, and I'm kicking myself for not learning this a year ago.

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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson le 13 Août 2015
subaxis(4,6,1, 'Spacing', 0.03, 'Padding', 0, 'Margin', 0, 'SpacingVert', 0.03);

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