What does tight_subplot return in MatLab?

Question

What does tight_subplot return in MatLab?

The documentation says the following:

   out:  ha     array of handles of the axes objects
                    starting from upper left corner, going row-wise as in
                    going row-wise as in

(and yes that typo is in the documentation verbatim).

When I print out ha, for example, it shows floating point values:

>> ha=tight_subplot(2,1,[.001 .001],[.1 .1],[.1 .1]);
>> ha

ha =

    0.0037
    1.0037

What do these values represent? And, how are these floating point values also "handles" as they are called in the documentation?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In short, those values do not mean anything by themselves in the sense that they are only floating point values. They actually refer to the actual object created by the tight_subplot function, that is each individual subplot/axes created.

Here ha is actually a 2x1 array containing the reference to both axes created, which you can modify as you wish using Property/Value pairs using ha(1), ha(2),...ha(k) for k axes.

For instance, after writing your code above, you can make the 2nd axes (i.e. the 2nd object created by the function) not visible like so:

set(ha(2),'Visible','off')

Hence ha(...) refers to the axes created by the function.

You can fetch every property of those axes using the get command:

get(ha(1)) 

for example.

Hope this is clearer!