I'm doing some plots in Matlab 2014b, in one them I'm plotting 5 variables versus time over there and want to specify 5 names like, speed (rad/sec), voltage (V), ... etc. on the y-label, however, as you can see in the picture, I'm getting extra bland space on the left, and struggling to removed it.

Here is a working code, just to explain the situation:

clear all; clc; close all;

x = rand(8,1);

y = rand(8,1);



figure

plot(x,y)

xlabel('time (s)')

ylabel('$x$ (m), $theta$ (rad), $dot{x}$ (m/s),$dot{theta}$ (rad/s), $dot{S}_{gen}$(W/K)','Interpreter', 'latex','fontsize',10)

grid

Any suggestions are highly appreciated in advance.

You can tweak the positioning of the axes in the figure window as follows (using your example code):

clear all; clc; close all;

x = rand(8,1);

y = rand(8,1);



figure;

ax = handle(gca);

ax.Position = [0.1, 0.15, 0.8, 0.75];

plot(x,y)

xlabel('time (s)')

ylabel('$x$ (m), $theta$ (rad), $dot{x}$ (m/s),$dot{theta}$ (rad/s), $dot{S}_{gen}$(W/K)','Interpreter', 'latex','fontsize',10)

grid

Explanation of the code

In ax = handle(gca); you store the axes handle in variable ax such that you can alter it later on.

In ax.Position [0.1, 0.15, 0.8, 0.75]; you change the position of the axes in the figure referred by handle ax. The example above sets the lower left point at the coordinates 0.1, 0.15 and a width and height of 0.8 and 0.75 respectively. These coordinates are normalized w.r.t. to your figure size.

Example plots

Initial situation

If you set the ax.Position to [0.25, 0.15, 0.7, 0.75] you get something like you had initially:

Solution

If you set the ax.Position to [0.1, 0.1, 0.85, 0.85] you get far less whitespace:

Notes

This MATLAB help link explains how you can define the axes position "automatically" such that there is a tighter fit.
This MATLAB help link on axes explains what parameters are available in the axes object.
This answer over at Stackoverflow helped me find a way to use the dot notation in MATLAB versions prior to 2014b. Apparently using handle() is also faster than the set and get methods.