Matlab: Overlapping subplot titles

Question

I'm using subplot which contains three different plots. Each plot has its own labels and title.
The problem is that I have to maximize the plot when I save it. Otherwise, the texts will overlap each other.
When I maximize it, the subplot's label text will appear little blurry in the image, even if I use ESP format or any vector format.
How can I resolve this issue?

Which text? Do you want to remove the numbers on the axes (the title of your question)? Or do you want to solve your problem with blurry text (what all the answers are about and the subject of [several](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9711228/matlab-blurry-titles) [previous](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9489363/how-to-prevent-latex-labels-in-matlab-gui-to-become-blurry) [questions](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16702605/blurry-label-text-in-matlab-plots))? — horchler, May 23 '13 at 21:23
Non-overlapping text with subplots is one of those things that Matlab *really* should get right on its own... but doesn't :-( — Flyto, Sep 19 '19 at 21:17

Da Kuang · Answer 1 · 2013-05-23T20:36:29.460

5

For the title overlap issues, you can produce multiple lines of title text use a cell array of strings as the input parameter of title():

title_text = {'first line', 'second line', 'third line'};
title(title_text);

And it works for label text too.

edited May 23 '13 at 20:36

answered May 23 '13 at 20:31

Da Kuang

852
1
8
15

Unfortunately, It dose not work for labels :(.. thank you any way – hola May 23 '13 at 20:36
1

It's strange that it's not working for you (it works for me as well). It's a bit cumbersome, but you could try putting in the line breaks manually with sprintf: `a = axes; t = xlabel(sprintf('My Really Long Label\n On another line\n And another'));` – Huguenot May 23 '13 at 20:48

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 23 '13 at 20:38

In addition to Da Kuang's answer, if you would like to keep your titles and labels on the same line, you could change the font size

a = axes;
t = title('My Really Long Title');
l = xlabel('My Really Long x label')
set(t, 'FontSize', 8)
set(l, 'FontSize', 8)

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 23 '13 at 21:30

I'm not sure why your labels are blurry, but I can help with the overlap.

I never use subplot when I want to save images (eg. for a paper). What I do instead is create each axes individually, which allows a lot more control over each of them.

Below is a rather general example, which illustrates how to generate an arbitrary grid of axes with much finer control over their placement than subplot allows. Of course, with only 3 axes, you don't really need the loop, but I'm sure you can adapt this to fit your needs.

% first create the figure
figPos = [200 200 800 500];
figure('Color', 'w', 'Position', figPos)

% next, determine how much padding you want on each side of the axes, and in
% between axes. I usually play around with these, and the figure size until
% the layout looks correct.

leftPadding = 50/figPos(3); % the space at the left of the figure
rightPadding = 25/figPos(3); % the space at the right of the figure
horizPadding = 80/figPos(3); % the space between axes (horizontally)
topPadding = 30/figPos(4); % the space at the top of the figure
bottomPadding = 50/figPos(4); % the space at the bottom of the figure
vertPadding = 120/figPos(4); % the space between axes (vertically)

% set up the grid size
nHorizAxes = 2;
nVertAxes = 3;

% figure out how big each axes should be
horizPlotSpace = 1-leftPadding-rightPadding-(nHorizAxes-1)*horizPadding;
vertPlotSpace = 1-topPadding-bottomPadding-(nVertAxes-1)*vertPadding;
width = horizPlotSpace/nHorizAxes;
height = vertPlotSpace/nVertAxes;

myAxes = zeros(nVertAxes, nHorizAxes);

% create some sample data to plot for illustrative purposes
x = linspace(0, 2*pi);
y = sin(x);

for iRow = 1:nVertAxes
    for iCol = 1:nHorizAxes
        % calculate the position
        left = leftPadding+(iCol-1)*(width+horizPadding);
        bottom = bottomPadding+(iRow-1)*(height+vertPadding);
        position = [left bottom width height];

        myAxes(iRow, iCol) = axes('Position', position);
        plot(x, y)
        xlabel('Test Label')
        ylabel('Test Label')
        title(sprintf('axes(%d, %d)', iRow, iCol))
    end
end

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 23 '13 at 21:09

Those answers should help but here are some other things to try, depending on the cause of the overlapping text:

Change the figure's size so there's room for the text. For example:

set(gcf, 'PaperSize', [5 7])

Change the size of the subplots.

s = get(gca, 'Position');
set(gca, 'Position', [s(1), s(2), s(3), s(4) * 0.5])

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 27 '21 at 23:35

MATLAB (R2021b) appears to stop updating the size of subplots after the axes function is used to set the current axes. The following code causes the title to be cut off.

sp1 = subplot(2, 1, 1);
sp2 = subplot(2, 1, 2);

axes(sp1) % Set the current axes to the first subplot.
title(sprintf('Hello\nCruel\nWorld'))

On the other hand, if title is called immediately after the first subplot is opened, without using axes, then the title has sufficient space to be completely visible.

sp1 = subplot(2, 1, 1);
title(sprintf('Hello\nCruel\nWorld'))
sp2 = subplot(2, 1, 2);

As a workaround, if you need to set the values for a prior subplot, you can simply pass sp1 as the first argument of the desired function.

sp1 = subplot(2, 1, 1);
sp2 = subplot(2, 1, 2);
title(sp1, sprintf('Hello\nCruel\nWorld'))

Matlab: Overlapping subplot titles

5 Answers5

Related