Resizing Figure to Make Room for Title without Resizing Plot

I'm trying to create a figure. I want the plot sizes to remain the same, but I want more room at the top of the figure to display my titles.

How do I accomplish this? I can't simply resize the entire figure, becuase the plot sizes increase too!

Answer 1

[dpb]

hAx=gca;
hAx.Position=hAx.Position.*[1 1 1 0.95];

adjusts the height of axes to be 95% of default/previous height. Adjust to suit; repeat for each axes.

If you have saved all the axes handles, one could do it globally via set(hAx, ...) get() with some machinations.

[Yugarshi Mondal]

in your comment, the first line should be hAx (not Ax), but other than that -- thanks!

[dpb]

+1 Typo corrected.

[Yugarshi Mondal]

Ahh, I just noticed now that the lower part gets cut off -- other thoughts?

[dpb]

I can't reproduce that here; the above only reduces the position vector 4th position which is [left bottom width height].

I can cause the upper title to be clipped by increasing 'fontsize' sufficiently, but the above to reduce the axes height serves to provide sufficient room without moving anything below.

Can you post a script that will reproduce the symptoms? Can be just random data...

[Yugarshi Mondal]

f1 = figure(1); set(gcf,'Position', [10 10 1450 350])
axFnt = 12; ttlFnt = 20; lblFnt = 13;
for k = 1:3
    subplot(1,3,k)
    plot([1:300],[1:300])
    xlabel('time [ms]','FontSize',lblFnt); ylabel('\Delta S [units]','FontSize',lblFnt);
    xlim([0 300]); %ylim([0 .4]);
    ttl = title(strcat('A',num2str(k)),'FontSize',ttlFnt);
    ttl.Units = 'Normalize'; 
    ttl.Position(1) = 0; % use negative values (ie, -0.1) to move further left
    ttl.HorizontalAlignment = 'left';
    hAx=gca; hAx.Position=hAx.Position.*[1 1 1 0.95];
end

[dpb]

Order is significant turns out...without digging even further into bowels of what gets munged on when moving the title around and making it bigger than was designed for, the following resulted in what appears to be wanted:

k=1; 
hAx(k)=subplot(1,3,k);              % save the axes handles when create the object
plot([1:300],[1:300])
xlabel('time [ms]','FontSize',lblFnt); ylabel('\Delta S [units]','FontSize',lblFnt);
hAx(k).Position(4)=hAx.Position(4)*0.95;
hTtl(k)=title(strcat('A',num2str(k)),'FontSize',ttlFnt,'Position',[0 300],'HorizontalAlignment','left');

The key is to create the x-,y-labels BEFORE writing the title and munging on its position grossly while the auto-scaling of the axes position is still operational. Once you write the title and mung on its position, that turns internal scaling off and the axes position stays fixed at the original default which is for smaller fontsize.

You could, of course, also adjust the lower position of the axes (2nd member 'Position' array) to raise it up some programmatically, but this seems to work without having to go through that algebra to calculate the desired position consistent with the height.

[Yugarshi Mondal]

I need to resize the figure -- I think this is causing problems, when I comment it out, the font labels look alright

close all; clear all; clc;
f1 = figure(1); set(gcf,'Position', [10 10 1450 350]) %% This resizing is causing problems
axFnt = 12; ttlFnt = 20; lblFnt = 13;
for k = 1:3
    hAx(k)=subplot(1,3,k);              % save the axes handles when create the object
    plot([1:300],[1:300])
    xlabel('time [ms]','FontSize',lblFnt); ylabel('\Delta S [units]','FontSize',lblFnt);
    hAx(k).Position(4)=hAx(k).Position(4)*0.95;
    hTtl(k)=title(strcat('A',num2str(k)),'FontSize',ttlFnt,'Position',[0 300],'HorizontalAlignment','left');
end

[dpb]

All was done here on that figure that produced the above. If your renderer/hardware doesn't, then will have to raise the lower position of the axes and recompute the height to match sufficiently to have more room below.

Or, just go with a slightly smaller fontsize would be the easy way out... :)

[Yugarshi Mondal]

sorry i didn't follow, so you weren't able to reproduce the problem with the code I posted?

[dpb]

I got the figure I attached before with the same figure height, yes.

[dpb]

However, you can try something like

f1 = figure(1); set(gcf,'Position', [10 10 1450 350]) %% This resizing is causing problems
axFnt = 12; ttlFnt = 20; lblFnt = 13;
for k = 1:3
    hAx(k)=subplot(1,3,k);              % save the axes handles when create the object
    plot([1:300],[1:300])
    xlabel('time [ms]','FontSize',lblFnt); ylabel('\Delta S [units]','FontSize',lblFnt);
    hAx(k).Position(4)=hAx(k).Position(4)*0.95;
    hTtl(k)=title(strcat('A',num2str(k)),'FontSize',ttlFnt,'Position',[0 300],'HorizontalAlignment','left');
    hAx(k).Position(2)=hAx(k).Position(2)+hAx(k).Position(4)*0.05;
end

And see if that helps enough. You may then have to reduce the height a little more, too.

[Adam Danz]

What release of matlab are you using?

I couldn't reproduce the problem in r2020b in any of the examples given.

If you're using r2020b or later, a better way to control the left alignment of the title is by using the TitleHorizontalAlignment property of the axes

ax.TitleHorizontalAlignment = 'left'; % ax is axis handle

[More info].

[dpb]

I got the effect with R2019b, Adam, although behavior differed between having an existing figure of the given height and rewriting into it even if deleted all axes and started over from that of creating the new figure and writing into it the first time. Why that would be, I have no idea.

[Yugarshi Mondal]

thanks both of you -- @dpb I've been using modifications of your last posted code to do a variety of figures! I've just been changing numbers -- but what does the last line in the loop do?

[dpb]

Were so many iterations I'm guessing it is the following line in Q?

hAx(k).Position(2)=hAx(k).Position(2)+hAx(k).Position(4)*0.05;

It's just raising the bottom of the axes a little, adding 5% of the height (the 4th element in position vector) to the second (the bottom location). Remember the position vector is defined as [left bottom width height].

The 5% factor is the complement of the 95% that I used above to reduce the height so the final top location will be almost back to its original location.

In original testing, I didn't see the need to make the adjustment to the bottom position if one reduced the height after creating the labels; then it seemed to adjust the postions adequately for clearance. However, I later discovered behavior is different between creating a new figure and writing into it and in having an existing figure of the same dimensions and rewriting into it, even after one deletes all existing axes from the figure. As noted above, I have no idea why that should be so; clearly something gets munged on internally by the previous plotting that doesn't go back to precisely the same initial conditions as are present when the figure is first created.

It was to fix that last small aberration that I just then raised up the location of the bottom axis a smidge...

[Yugarshi Mondal]

Thanks for the explanation!

More than that, I was dumping insets into the figure. The insets were causing additinal consternation -- but they were fixed by modifying the line you mentioned along with the fourth line in the loop!