Can I change the width of a single bar in a bar plot?

I have a grouped bar plot, bb:

bb = bar(x,y)

where x is a 7x1 double vector with month numbers and y is a 7x5 double vector with measurement data. For each of the seven time points, I get five bars with data.

I would like to add some spacing between the first two and the last three bars in each group. One idea I came up with is to add a column of NaNs to y (to make it 7x6 with the third column empty). However, this creates a very wide gap between my bars. I would prefer to make it smaller by changing the width of this 'NaN' bar in the plot while keeping the other bars as they are. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

[Voss]

Does the gap still appear too wide if you widen the bars?

x = (1:7).';
y = rand(7,5);
new_y = NaN(size(y)+[0 1]);
new_y(:,[1 2 4:end]) = y;
% bb = bar(x,new_y);
bb = bar(x,new_y,'BarWidth',1);

[Corymbiamaculata]

With the gap being as wide as bars (regardless of the width specified), it's difficult to visually distinguish the seven groups. I would prefer the gap within a group to be significantly smaller than the gaps between groups.

[Adam Danz]

There's no way to do that using the bar() command with grouped bars.

An ugly workaround may be possible such as plotting all bars individually and computing their x-coordinates but it sounds like a headache and something vulnerable to bugs.

Perhaps you could visually group them using color or xline lines but I haven't thought out the details.

[Corymbiamaculata]

I actually have them grouped by a hatched pattern already, but I'm still not 100% satisfied, that's why I hoped there was a way to add a small gap within the groups.

I can obviously divide the data into two figures, but I hoped to avoid that, since each figure has six subplots. I don't want to multiply entities beyond necessity :)