Luckily, I have R2021a installed in my old laptop and so I was able to reproduce the issue. Initially I saw it in App Designer, but then I tested with a plain “uifigure” + “uiaxes” (no App Designer) and was still able to reproduce the same behavior (after using Copy as Image or “copygraphics”, the axes stopped resizing automatically when the legend was added/removed).
When I tried the same script in the current release (R2025a), the problem never resurfaced, the axes continue to shrink/expand correctly with the legend even after copying or saving.
To me, this looks like a version specific issue and thus a simple MATLAB version upgrade would fix the issue.
I am attaching the script I used for reproducing the issue for reference:
%Run the script section by section.
% Try to clear the plot, re plot several times, and then use
% copygraphics, then try to clear plot, do the plot
% again, notice the uiaxes doesn't change its size automatically.
f = uifigure;
a = uiaxes(f);
%%
Xdata = 1:1:10;
Yseed = 0.1:0.1:1;
hold(a, 'on');
for (i=1:10)
Ydata = i * Yseed;
legendStr{i} = sprintf('Signal %d', i);
handles(i) = plot(a, Xdata, Ydata);
end
hold(a, 'off');
% create legend
leg = legend(handles, legendStr, 'Location', 'southoutside', 'Orientation', 'horizontal', 'NumColumns', 1);
%a.Toolbar.Visible = 'off';[AB1] [AG2]
%a.Toolbar.Visible = 'on';
%%
cla(a);
legend(a, 'off');[AB3]
I hope this helps!
