How do I put minor ticklabel on and ticklabel off ?

I have some subplots glued together and the tick labels appear on the extremes of the axis overlaying the label of the adjacent subplot. I turn on the minor tick and I would like to give the tick labels to the minor ones and turn off the labels of the major ticks. Can I automatically do this with the 'ticklabel' 'on/off'?

I know I can set the labels manually, but I have a bunch of plots where my variable changes and it takes a lot of effort and time to know the size of the axis and where to put the ticks.

[Massimo Zanetti]

Can you post image of your plots?

[dpb]

Probably can't get the desired result with that big of a hammer--even with HG2 have virtually no control over minor ticks other than whether they're on/off. See <Possible-to-label-the-last-minor-tick?> for a previous comment.

How about attaching a figure that shows the problem? Perhaps someone will have some ideas seeing the specifics. I'd note that owing to the above, it's not possible to read the minor tick positions programmatically; if the range is consistent across plots you may be able to figure out where they are heuristically but if the values change drastically that'll be a challenge, too. The minor ticks, unfortunately, are minor indeed in TMW's treatment of them and we're not supposed to care... :(

[Sara Antonio]

Thank you for replying. This is the kind of plots I´m trying to do. As you can see, the labels on the y ticks goes under the adjacent plot label. Again, I know how to fix it manually by setting the position of the ticks, but I have a lot of similar plots with different y values.

[dpb]

Probably computing a percentage difference and computing the new desired ticks at a relative position based on the retrieved ylim values will be what will need to do here if you can't live with leaving some white space between the subplots.

One thing you could do that would also help would be to retrieve ylabel position of the plot with the largest-magnitude y-axis values and adjust the rest to align them vertically so they aren't scattered around as the default leaves them.

Ain't HG a pain!? :) It's such a hassle to be able to get at stuff that TMW hasn't thought of a priori. :(

Answer 1

[Nick Counts]

Ok, I have a possible workaround. It doesn't truly answer your question, but it might still achieve your aim?

You could shift the YTickLabels over so they don't overlap. I have two methods for doing this: one that only uses documented properties, but is a little messy, and one that uses an undocumented property:

Documented

This approach is to simply pad the YTickLabel strings with whitespace. You can get fancy trying to calculate how much whitespace, or just do a uniform padding:

    % Make an example figure:
        fig = figure;
        fig.Units = 'centimeters';
        fig.Position(3:4) = [13  20];
    % Populate sample axes that are 'touching'
        plotPositions = [ 3, 13,  7,  6;
                          3,  7,  7,  6;
                          3,  1,  7,  6];
        for i = 1:size(plotPositions,1)
            hAx(i) = subplot(3, 1, i);
            hAx(i).Units = 'centimeters';
            scatter(  hAx(i), 1:10, randi(10, 10, 1), 'bo')
            hAx(i).Position = plotPositions(i,:);
            hAx(i).XGrid = 'on';
            hAx(i).YGrid = 'on';
        end

    % Pad every other axis YTickLabel
        for i = 1:2:size(plotPositions, 1)

            yAxisLabels = hAx(i).YRuler.TickLabel;
            paddingArray = repmat({'     '},length(yAxisLabels),1);
            yAxisLabelsPadded = strcat(yAxisLabels, paddingArray);

            hAx(i).YRuler.TickLabel = yAxisLabelsPadded;
        end

That example produces this result:

Undocumented Approach

In the HG2 system, there are a bunch of hidden properties for many graphics objects. Here I am using the TickLabelGapOffset property of the axes' YRuler objects.

    % Make an example figure:
        fig = figure;
        fig.Units = 'centimeters';
        fig.Position(3:4) = [13  20];
    % Populate sample axes that are 'touching'
        plotPositions = [ 3, 13,  7,  6;
                          3,  7,  7,  6;
                          3,  1,  7,  6];
        for i = 1:size(plotPositions,1)
            hAx(i) = subplot(3, 1, i);
            hAx(i).Units = 'centimeters';
            scatter(  hAx(i), 1:10, randi(10, 10, 1), 'bo')
            hAx(i).Position = plotPositions(i,:);
            hAx(i).XGrid = 'on';
            hAx(i).YGrid = 'on';
        end

    % Change the Tick Label Gap for every other axis
        for i = 1:2:size(plotPositions, 1)
            oldGapOffset = hAx(i).YRuler.TickLabelGapOffset;
            hAx(i).YRuler.TickLabelGapOffset = oldGapOffset + 20;
        end

This approach looks very much the same, and produces this result:

Hopefully this helps! Good luck with your complex plotting :)

Answer 2

[Nick Counts]

I'm a dummy - I completely forgot about HideEndTicksIfOutside !

Setting this to 'on' will hide both the Major tick mark and associated label :)

    % Make an example figure:
        fig = figure;
        fig.Units = 'centimeters';
        fig.Position(3:4) = [13  20];
    % Populate sample axes that are 'touching'
        plotPositions = [ 3, 13,  7,  6;
                          3,  7,  7,  6;
                          3,  1,  7,  6];
        for i = 1:size(plotPositions,1)
            hAx(i) = subplot(3, 1, i);
            hAx(i).Units = 'centimeters';
            scatter(  hAx(i), 1:10, randi(10, 10, 1), 'bo')
            hAx(i).Position = plotPositions(i,:);
            hAx(i).XGrid = 'on';
            hAx(i).YGrid = 'on';
        end

    % Hide outer tick marks on alternating plots
        for i = 1:2:size(plotPositions, 1)
            hAx(i).YRuler.HideEndTicksIfOutside = 'on';
        end

Answer 3

[Massimo Zanetti]

One solution can be to set y-limits to larger values, and then force the labels to be the original ones. This way, the labels will result inside the limits, and not on the edge positions.