MATLAB: Offset of ticks labels

axisgraphMATLABoffsetticks label

Hello,
I am finishing graph to the publication and it looks like this.
The problem is, that y-ticks label are very close to y-axis ("0" is even touching it) and it looks ugly. Is there a way how to set the larger space between tick labels and the axis – set some kind of offset or tell to graph to be smaller then its original size?
Thanks in advance

Best Answer

Not w/o using text instead of letting the axis tick property control them, no.
First fix the formatting issue with tick labels that I've harped on for nearly 30 years -- that of not putting the same number of decimal places on all labels instead of letting integers default. That may fix the problem adequately that you can live with it, but it will certainly go a long way towards the "truly professional" look that I agree is somewhat lacking as default...
ytk=get(gca,'ytick').';  % get the tick values as column vector
set(gca,'yticklabel',num2str(ytk,'%0.1f'))
Ohhh....just thought of a "trick"...let's see--
set(gca,'yticklabel',num2str(ytk,'%0.1f '))
Drat! The renderer strips out the trailing blank so only way to reposition will be via the use of text as mentioned above. Changing positions won't help as the axes labels will just move around together.
ERRATUM While this is quite old, OP did an edit that came up as new activity and in rereading the thread I notice a misstatement that just by chance I discovered the issue in just within the last couple of days at the newsgroup. That is I presumed above that the problem w/ the trailing space in the above was owing to HG; turns out it's a "feature" (I think I think it's a bug, but it's documented behavior) in num2str that it strips blanks even if given a specific format statement so the above doesn't actually pass the string with the trailing blank had assumed it did. One would have to build the string array and append the blank or use sprintf to make the format "stick". END ERRATUM
Oh, I guess you could get more complicated and add a second axes object for the actual display and set the tick labels to empty on the original...but I think just writing text is probably simpler than that.
ADDENDUM
text example code--as above start with retrieving the current tick values, then
set(gca,'yticklab',[])     % clear the labels so don't show
xtik=get(gca,'xtick'); dxtik=xtik(2)-xtik(1);  % diff between x ticks
xpos=xtik(1)-0.1*dxtik;      % a guess at suitable x location
text(repmat(xpos,size(ytk)),ytk,num2str(ytk,'%0.1f'),'horizontal','right')
The x-position is arbitrary; adjust as desired. I took 10% of the x-axis tick spacing to the left of the first x-tick. You could switch over to absolute positions and remove the dependence on the actual axes values; I'll leave that as "exercise for the student"... :)
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