How do I make the legend color rectangles smaller?

In barplots legends I find too wide the boxes that show each color. I want they to be more like squares so I can have a narrower legend and save space. Is there any way to do it?

Answer 1

[Girijashankar Sahoo]

legend({'A','B'},'Position',[0.2 0.6 0.1 0.2])

%% four-element vector of the form [left bottom width height]

[Jesús Gutiérrez]

Thanks, but that didn't help. Outside box is already at it's minimum size. What I want to do is to make the color rectangles narrower, that way the outside box width could be reduced. I don't know if its possible.

[Adriano]

Did you fix your problem? I have the same one...

[Bill Tubbs]

This doesn't seem to have an effect on the size of the coloured boxes. For example, if I set my legend position to [0.15 0.68 0.0 0.21]` the rectangle size does not go lower than it's minimum which is about 0.2 inches.

The width of these colour boxes seems a bit excessive. Especially when for some publications the whole figure has to be less than 3".

[Miguel Ángel Palomo]

After playing with the objects in a graph, I`ve found a way to change the size and shape of the boxes that show each color. I`ve found that each of the color boxes is a patch in the icons of the legend, and you can work from there.

[h,icons] = legend([A,B],{'F_mean','F_max'});
legend('boxoff') %This is optional

boxes=findobj(icons,'type','patch');

box1=boxes(1);
box1.XData=[0.4;0.4;0.6;0.6];
%The values here work for my case, but you may have to change them
box1.LineWidth=1;

box2=boxes(2);
box2.XData=[0.4;0.4;0.6;0.6];
box2.LineWidth=1;

%You may also change YData, but it is not necessary to make them square-like. 

After this, the boxes look like this: