How to hide one of the figure plot borders?

I have three subplots in a figure, and I want to overlap portions of them to save space. My question is how do I hide one of the borders of any of the subplots?

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

More programmatically...

If you don't need any of the axis details, you can just set do

set(gca, 'visible', 'off');

The contents of the axis will still be visible, just not the box, ticks, tick labels, etc. If you want to just get rid of one axis (i.e. just x or just y), you can sort of do it via

col = get(gcf, 'color');
set(gca, 'box', 'off', 'xtick', [], 'xcolor', col, 'color', 'none');

But that works best if your axes and figure have the same background color, since you can't hide a single x/y axis completely, just blend it into the background.

[Leon]

Thank you, but how do I turn off the axis on the top (the one parallel to the x-axis?

[Kelly Kearney]

Setting 'box' to 'off' turns off the upper and right axis lines and ticks. If you want something more complicated than that you might have to play around with layering axes. An example might us answer more precisely.

[Leon]

Thank you! I only want to turn off the one on the top, not the one to the right. What is layering axes?

[Kelly Kearney]

By layering, I mean creating two (or more) axes on top of each other to get a combination of properties you can't get with a single axis, similar to the way plotyy works. Useful to have different ticks on left/right or top/bottom, to use multiple colormaps in a plot, etc.

In your case:

ax(1) = axes('position', [0.1 0.1 0.8 0.8], 'box', 'off');
ax(2) = axes('position', [0.1 0.1 0.8 0.8], 'box', 'off', ...
             'yaxisloc', 'right', 'color', 'none', 'xtick', []);

You may want to add a

linkaxes(ax)

to make sure the two stay in sync.

[Aliyuda Ali]

Many thanks Kelly Kearney. This code set(gca, 'visible', 'off'); works for me.

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

Just use plottools to make whatever changes you want (including adjusting the size)

plottools on

Or click the icon on the right hand side of the figure toolbar.