Columns (with different column sizes) in plotlegend

Dear Matlab community,

I would like to have a three columned legend as shown in this picture:

I tried Legend Location and Number of Columns, but unfortunately the result with three columns isn’t grouped as I need to (as you can see).

Do you have any advice how to group the columns differently? I use R2019b.

Best wishes

Lukas

Answer 1

[Voss]

I don't know of a way to do that by setting legend properties, but you can create "dummy" lines that don't appear in you plot but do hold space in the legend.

Here's an example of plotting 16 lines in a loop and after the 5th and 10th lines are plotted creating the "dummy" lines for the legend:

hold on
for ii = 1:16
    plot(1:10,rand(1,10));
    if ii == 5 || ii == 10
        plot(NaN,NaN,'LineStyle','none','DisplayName','')
    end
end
legend('NumColumns',3)

I imagine that you should be able to do the same in your code by inserting plot(NaN,NaN,'LineStyle','none','DisplayName','') in the right two places.

[Luke]

Thank you, I didn't know about the "dummy" line option.