How to plot four subfigures in one figure? Rather than subplot

Dear all

I want to draw a figure like this. Four subfigures merged into one figure. They are separated by a dashed line. Line 1 to 4 are imported. And X-axis is 0-2 repeatably. Could you please give me any hint? Thanks

[KSSV]

With hold on, and managing the xlabels, xticks this can be achieved.

[dpb]

It can also be done by creating multiple axes and position them and controlling their properties.

Either approach, however, is some effort.

Might search the FEX to see if somebody has already done so and posted their efforts...

[Adam]

I would go for the multiple axes approach myself, though if they are right next to each other you will have problems with those x labels where you want both a '2' for the end of one and a '0' for the start of the other. I guess you can miss of the '2' labels (or equivalently the '0' labels') and use the XTickLabel property for the 0 of each axes to change it to '2/0' as you have in your picture if you wish.

[dpb]

Yeah, the tick labels will have to be written manually to look like that...which will mean writing callback routines if want any of the dynamic stuff to work with changes in xlim, zoom, etc., ...

To do it to make one figure for presentation isn't too terrible but "to do it right" would be a lot of effort, unfortunately.

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

I think the only slightly difficult part of this would be the modified x-ticks. When I create adjacent axes like this, I prefer to stagger the x axes tick locations between the top and bottom of the axes, like in the following example. Would that work for your case?

mar = 0.1; % margin around axes
nax = 4;   % number of axes
xpos = linspace(mar, 1-mar, nax+1);

% Make the axes

for ii = 1:nax
    ax(ii) = axes('position', [xpos(ii) mar (1-2*mar)./nax 1-2*mar]);
end
set(ax, 'xlim', [0 2], 'ylim', [0 15], 'ydir', 'reverse', 'box', 'off');
set(ax(2:end), 'ycolor', 'none');

% Stagger x-axes so xticks don't overlap

set(ax(2:2:end), 'xaxisloc', 'top');

% Add a box around all the axes, and dashed lines between them

an = annotation('rectangle', [mar mar 1-2*mar 1-2*mar]);
for ii = 1:3
    annotation('line', [xpos(ii+1) xpos(ii+1)], [mar 1-mar], 'linestyle', '--');
end

[dpb]

Nicely done for the position calc's; that's cleaner than any I'd ever sat down and coded...consider the snippet stolen! :)