barmod

Control with ease the relative position and color of every bar, bar group, and offset in your bar chart.

Disappointed by the lack of control in Matlab’s bar function and wanting to create visually-pleasing bar charts, I’ve created the barmod function. This function gives you control over; the pixel height of the plot, the aspect ratio, bar offset (spacing between individual bars in groups), bar group offset (spacing between groups of bars), x-limit offset (space between data and plot extents on either side of plot), y-limit offset (space between data and plot extents on top and bottom of plot), and the labels of the categories of your bar chart. This function is a modification of Cris Luengo’s solution to controlling the space between bar groups (https://stackoverflow.com/a/50432076).

In greater detail, the barmod function’s eight inputs in order are:

x – your bar chart data (size NBG x n, where “NBG” is the number of bar groups and “n” is the number of bars/group)
yhp – plot height in pixels
ar – aspect ratio (width/height)
bo – bar offset (spacing between individual bars within groups—input as ratio to individual bar width)
bgo – bar group offset (spacing between groups of bars—input as ratio to *total bar group width)
xlimo – x-limit offset (space between left/right extents of bar chart data and left/right extents of plot, respectively—input as ratio to total bar group width)
ylimo – y-limit offset (space between top/bottom extents of bar chart data and top/bottom extents of plot, respectively—input as ratio to total bar group width)
labels – labels corresponding to bar groups.

*total bar group width is the sum of the widths of each bar and the widths of each bar offset in a group

The default for each input is:

x: random 1-to-5 x 1-to-5 barchart†
yhp: 500 (pixels)
ar: 5/4
bgo: 1/2
bo: 0 (no gap between bars within a group)
xlimo: bgo
ylimo: xlimo
labels: strcat(‘title’,num2str(i)), where i is the bar group index

†With style ‘hist’, the bar function in matlab does not display data inputs of a single datum, and therefore neither does this function.

As far as plot styling and color (including a y = 0 baseline), I leave that to the user (the default color map is parula).

Check out barmod_demo for examples, limits of functionality, workarounds, and more!