Remove deadspace or increase size of figure in subplot

Question

I have a problem in matlab. I output an image as shown in the example and save it by the print command. What I want to do is save the image in such a way that there is no deadspace i.e, I want to remove the white-space in the image saved.

Example :

The black border shows the total area the image is occupying. This is a really a wastage of space. I want to remove this. What I want to do is this:

I have manually removed the white area around the image. But I want to do this automatically by the print command. Can it be done? Also if possible can the title remain ? Even if it gets removed then also its okay but if the title can remain its better.

Answer 1

I answered this at this other topic and also gave an example of how to improve axes (subplot) space usage here (search for the subfunction setCustomPlotArea inside the function kmeans_test).

The short answer is to spread axes position to occupy the whole figure as follows:

set(gca,'Position',[0 0 1 1]) % Make the axes occupy the whole figure

But if you want to keep ylabel, xlabel, and so on, you will have to use the following approach:

Removing dead space for only one axes

figure
plot([1 3])
title('Cool title')
ylabel('Ylabel yeah')
xlabel('Xlabel nah')
% Approach
tightPos=get(gca,'TightInset')
noDeadSpacePos = [0 0 1 1] + [tightPos(1:2) -(tightPos(1:2) + ...
  tightPos(3:4))];
set(gca,'Position',noDeadSpacePos)

Which gives you the following figure:

Removing dead space for multiple axes

I have adapted the setCustomPlotArea as follows:

function squeeze_axes(handles)
%
% squeeze_axes(handles) Squeeze axes to remove dead space.
%
%   Inputs:
%
% -> handles: the subplot axes handles organized as a grid. I.e.
% handles(1,1) is the axes in the first line and first column, whereas
% handles(4,4) is the axes in the forth line and forth column.
%

% - Creation Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 
% - Last Modified: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 
% - Author(s): 
%   - W.S.Freund <wsfreund_at_gmail_dot_com> 

% TODO: Make squeeze axes compatible with axes that occupy multiple
% subplot places.

nHorSubPlot =  size(handles,2);
nVertSubPlot = size(handles,1);

subplotWidth = 1/nHorSubPlot;
subplotHeight = 1/nVertSubPlot;

botPos = linspace(1-subplotHeight,0,nVertSubPlot);
leftPos = linspace(0,1-subplotWidth,nHorSubPlot);

for curLine=1:nVertSubPlot
  for curColumn=1:nHorSubPlot
    curAxes = handles(curLine,curColumn);
    if curAxes 
      % Set OuterPosition to occupy as most space as possible
      curAxesOuterPos = [leftPos(curColumn) botPos(curLine) subplotWidth ...
        subplotHeight];
      set(curAxes,'OuterPosition',curAxesOuterPos);
      % Remove dead space inside subplot border:
      curAxesTightPos=get(curAxes,'TightInset');
      noDeadSpacePos = curAxesOuterPos + [curAxesTightPos(1:2) ...
        -(curAxesTightPos(1:2) + curAxesTightPos(3:4))];
      set(curAxes,'Position',noDeadSpacePos)
    end
  end                                                         
end                                                           

end

Ploting the common matlab subplot function as follows:

figure
nLines = 2;
nColumns = 3;
handles = zeros(nLines,nColumns)
for line = 1:nLines
  for column = 1:nColumns
    handles(line,column)=subplot(nLines,nColumns,column+(line-1)*nColumns);
    plot([line column]);
    title(sprintf('Cool title (%d,%d)',line,column))
    ylabel(sprintf('Ylabel yeah (%d,%d)',line,column))
    xlabel(sprintf('Xlabel nah (%d,%d)',line,column))
  end
end

Gives you:

Removing its deadspace:

squeeze_axes(handles)

As an exercise I let the case where you have an axes occupying more than one space in the grid.