How to place tick-labels on the axis, essentially replacing the ticks with the labels?

Is there a way to replace the ticks on an axis with the tick labels? I have a figure where 2 subplots are stacked on top of each other and it feels crowded having the ticks labels floating above the ticks. I would like to replace the ticks with the labels if possible.

See below for an example of what I'd like to do:

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

Perhaps something like this —

x = 5:5:25;
y = randn(size(x));

figure
plot(x, y)
xt = xticks;
xtl = xticklabels;
text(xt, zeros(size(xt))+min(ylim), xtl, 'Vert','middle', 'Horiz','center', 'BackgroundColor','w')
xticklabels([])

Experiment to get the result you want.

.

[Image Analyst]

I have no idea why the original poster thinks this is preferable to the way the rest of the world does it. Personally, I don't like it. At the very least I'd add grid lines.

[Star Strider]

‘Mine is not to reason why ...’

(With apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

Answer 2

[dpb]

That's theorectically possible, but would be a pit(proverbial)a(ppendage) to accomplish; MATLAB HG2 has no provision to do any such thing as that...well, on second thought, I guess it might not be too bad after all; you could use a solid background on the text/annotation object to create the illusion of the broken axis line...

% preliminaries...
hL=plot(0:5:30,nan(1,7));
xlim([0 27])
xtk=xticks; xticks(xtk(2:end))
xticklabels([])
hAx=gca; hAx.YAxis.Visible='off';
box off
hF=gcf; hF.Color=hF.Color*0.8;
% down to business...
hTxt=text(xticks,zeros(size(xticks)),string(xticks),'horizontalalign','center','verticalalign','middle', ...
    'BackgroundColor',hAx.Color);

There's not an easy way to "split" the background of the text label to avoid the area around the labels that I can think of at the moment, however.

An alternative if using subplots, however, to reduce the clutter if the axes are the same would be to use stackedplot instead and they then share the x axis.