you could try to temporarly increase the figure size, export it and restore old behavior
%% create ui figure with three buttons, two of them out of sight
fig = uifigure(Position=[680 200 300 300],Scrollable="on");
uibutton(fig,Position=[100 150 100 22]);
uispinner(fig,Position=[400 150 100 22]); % too far to the right
uispinner(fig,Position=[100 10 100 22]);
fig.Position=[680 427 300 74]; % add vertical scrollability by setting small window size (just to show the concept of expanding along x and y)
% get components
allComps=fig.Children;
% get positions of components
positions=cell2mat(get(allComps,'Position'));
% get max extent of figure elements (x/y position plus x/y size)
maxX=max(sum(positions(:,[1 3]),2))*1.1;
maxY=max(sum(positions(:,[2 4]),2))*1.1;
% save old position
oldPos=fig.Position;
fig.Position(3:4)=[maxX maxY];
exportapp(fig,'expandedPDF.pdf');
% restore old position, size and scrollbars
fig.Position=oldPos; % old figure size, but tries to squeeze the buttons into the visible area
pause(1) % the figure squeezing needs some time, drawonw does not seem to do the job, pause helps here. If you leave out this line, the buttons will still be squeezed despite the next code line
% re set old positions of elements
arrayfun(@(in,row) set(in,'Position',positions(row,:)),allComps',1:numel(allComps))
pay attention to elements which are positioned at the edge of the figure, those are cut off when using exportapp. I could not fix this using code without
You can see the problem in the resulting pdf when e.g. setting
uispinner(fig,Position=[100 0 100 22]);
% instead of
uispinner(fig,Position=[100 10 100 22]);
