How to prevent plotted contents to spill outside of the axes lines

Using

set(gca, 'Layer', 'top')

I end up with this:

Is there a way to completely hide plotted contents that appear beyond the axes?

[Mitsu]

I also tried uistack(axisHandle,'top') , but it seems to be for other things and not applicable to this.

[Yazan]

The data looks like it is spilling outside the axes space because the size of the markers is large compared to the size of the figure (or axes). You just need to reduce the marker size or increase the figure size.

[Mitsu]

Thank you for your comment, Yazan. I am aware that I can always change the size of markers and lines, but that is not what I asked. I made them very big in this example to make it obvious for the purpose of this question.

[Yazan]

The property SizeData of a scatter plot is related to the area of the marker. So assuming you specify a circular marker, Matlab will plot circles centered at the data with a radius that can be computed from SizeData. So, for each data point, find the radius of the circular marker, compute the edge points locations (horizontal and vertical extensions of the marker), see if they exceeded the axis limits and discard the data point if so. This is unnecessarily complex in my opinion given that you just need to resize the axes to solve the issue.

Answer 1

[DGM]

One would think that the 'clipping' property of the axes object would take care of that, but I guess not.

Oof:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/279935-showing-only-part-of-markers-that-overflow-off-the-edges-of-a-plot

I don't know if that's a very practical approach, especially for as many markers as you have. It might be better to just adjust your axes limits a bit instead.

Answer 2

[Alexandra Molcanova]

this worked for me:

set(gca,'ClippingStyle','rectangle');

hope it helps :)

[DGM]

Interesting.

% some fake data
x = rand(100,1);
y = rand(100,1);

% it doesn't seem to work with scatter() objects
scatter(x,y,500,'filled')
set(gca,'ClippingStyle','rectangle');
grid on

% but it does work when using plot()
figure
plot(x,y,'.','markersize',80)
set(gca,'ClippingStyle','rectangle');
grid on