How to make axis line invisible but keep xlabel and ylabel?

I tried axis off, or set(gca,'xcolor','w'), but the problem is I want to keep the xlabel, morover white color is not good for me, because I am using imagesc and white ticks are visible on the colored figure.

Answer 1

[jonas]

h=get(gca);
set(h,'xcolor','none')
h.XAxis.Label.Color=[0 0 0];
h.XAxis.Label.Visible='on';

[Mr M.]

thanks, I always wonder how to find these kind of information, because I cannot find such information on standard MATLAB descriptions, or can I?

[jonas]

Well, yes and no. While some properties are are actually undocumented , most are described in the doc. The solution to your specific needs are however often not in the doc, and often times the best solution is to play around with the properties and see what works.

In this case, I just compared the label properties before and after setting 'xcolor' to 'none', and found the two properties that had been altered.

Don't forget to accept the answer :)

[Walter Roberson]

The information for the above is there, but it can take a while to learn where to look and to learn how it all relates together.

There are some parts of the MATLAB graphics system that are not documented and which require investigation and trial and error. For example, Yair recently did some interesting work on figuring out how to change the labels of contour plots, https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/customizing-contour-plots-part2

[giannit]

@jonas it doesn't work for me on R2019b, labels are still not visible

[Walter Roberson]

imagesc(rand(32,40))
xlabel('x')
ylabel('y')
zlabel('z')

h = gca;                  %fixed relative to jonas's suggestion
set(h,'xcolor','none')
h.XAxis.Label.Color=[0 0 0]; h.XAxis.Label.Visible='on';

The y label ticks are visible; the x label ticks are not; the x label itself is visible.

However, I have not tried this in R2019b.

[Adam Danz]

Another approach:

ax.XRuler.Axle.Visible = 'off'; % ax is axis handle
ax.YRuler.Axle.Visible = 'off'; 

Credit: Yair's UndocumentedMatlab