Prevent data from touching axes

Question

In MATLAB, is it possible to quickly/concisely increase the default padding around data in plots? In other words, I don't want the data to be too close to the axes.

Answer 1

If simply padding the existing axis is sufficient then the following should work. Say you want to add 10% to each side.

plot(...);
scale = 1.1;
ax = axis();
xc = 0.5 * (ax(1)+ax(2));
yc = 0.5 * (ax(3)+ax(4));
c = [xc,xc,yc,yc];
axis(scale * (ax - c) + c);