How can I show only the legend in MATLAB - matlab

Question

I want to show only the legend for a group of data in MATLAB.
The reason I want to do this is that I want to export the legend to .eps, but I only want the legend, not the plots.
Is there a way to turn off the plots and remove them from the figure, but still show just the legend centered?

Answer 1

This seems to do the trick:
plot(0,0,'k',0,0,'.r') %make dummy plot with the right linestyle
axis([10,11,10,11]) %move dummy points out of view
legend('black line','red dot')
axis off %hide axis
There is probably a lot of whitespace around the legend. You could try to resize the legend by hand, or save the plot and use some other program to set the bounding box of the eps.

Answer 2

The chosen solution by Marcin doesn't work anymore for R2016b because MATLAB's legend will automatically gray out invisible plots like this:
Neither turning off the automatic update of the legend nor changing the TextColor property afterwards fixes this. To see that, try Marcin's modified example:
clear all; close all;
figHandle = figure;
p1 = plot([1:10], [1:10], '+-');
hold on;
p2 = plot([1:10], [1:10]+2, 'o--');
legHandle = legend('text1', 'text2');
%turn off auto update
set(figHandle,'defaultLegendAutoUpdate','off');
set(p1, 'visible', 'off');
set(p2, 'visible', 'off');
set(gca, 'visible', 'off');
%set legend text color to black
legHandle.TextColor = [0 0 0];
The result remains the same. (To avoid throwing my laptop through the window) and fix this without zooming, which might leave fragments of the plot in the way, I wrote a function that fixes the legend and saves it to a file (with frame):
function saveLegendToImage(figHandle, legHandle, ...
fileName, fileType)
%make all contents in figure invisible
allLineHandles = findall(figHandle, 'type', 'line');
for i = 1:length(allLineHandles)
allLineHandles(i).XData = NaN; %ignore warnings
end
%make axes invisible
axis off
%move legend to lower left corner of figure window
legHandle.Units = 'pixels';
boxLineWidth = legHandle.LineWidth;
%save isn't accurate and would swallow part of the box without factors
legHandle.Position = [6 * boxLineWidth, 6 * boxLineWidth, ...
legHandle.Position(3), legHandle.Position(4)];
legLocPixels = legHandle.Position;
%make figure window fit legend
figHandle.Units = 'pixels';
figHandle.InnerPosition = [1, 1, legLocPixels(3) + 12 * boxLineWidth, ...
legLocPixels(4) + 12 * boxLineWidth];
%save legend
saveas(figHandle, [fileName, '.', fileType], fileType);
end
Tips for use:
fileType is a string that specifies a valid argument for saveas(), such as 'tif'.
Use it after you have plotted everything you want to appear in your legend, but without extra stuff. I'm not sure if all potential elements of a plot contain an XData member that isn't empty.
Add other types of displayed things that you want deleted, but are not of type line if there are any.
The resulting image will contain the legend, its box, and a little bit of space around it the legend is smaller than the minimum width (see Minimum Width of Figures in MATLAB under Windows). However, this is usually not the case.
Here is a complete example using the function from above:
clear all; close all;
fig = figure;
p1 = plot([1:10], [1:10], '+-');
hold on;
p2 = plot([1:10], [1:10]+2, 'o--');
legendHandle = legend('myPrettyGraph', 'evenMoreGraphs');
saveLegendToImage(fig, legendHandle, 'testImage', 'tif');

Answer 3

I think that you need to "hide" the elements you don't want in your plot, leaving out only the legend. For example,
clear all; close all;
figure;
p1 = plot([1:10], [1:10], '+-');
hold on;
p2 = plot([1:10], [1:10]+2, 'o--');
legend('text1', 'text2');
set(p1, 'visible', 'off');
set(p2, 'visible', 'off');
set(gca, 'visible', 'off');