thank you so much for the inspiring work and comments!

My issue is: As soon as the panel gets an axes, the panel is no longer transparent:

f = figure('Units','pixels','Position',[0 0 1000 800]);

p1 = uipanel(f,'Units','pixels','Position',[0 0 500 500] , 'BorderType','none');
a = axes(p1,'Units','pixels','Position',[0 0 400 200]);

p2 = uipanel(f,'Units','pixels','Position',[200 0 500 500 ] , 'BorderType','none');
drawnow;

j = p2.JavaFrame;
jPanel = j.getPrintableComponent;
jPanel.setOpaque(false)
jPanel.getParent.setOpaque(false)
jPanel.getComponent(0).setOpaque(false)
jPanel.repaint
pause( 2 )

% till now panel2 is transparent and axes1 is fully visible...
a2 = axes(p2,'Units','pixels','Position',[0 200 400 200]); % This line breaks panel 2 transparency somehow...

It would be so helpful to have invisible Panels with axes! Especially because of the fact, that axes can not overlay “foreign” panels…

Does anybody have a clue?

@Maurizio – instead of using the integrated Panel title, you can use a separate label control (uicontrol('Style','text',...) or a JLabel). Alternatively, you can customize the uipanel’s title.
* http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/customizing-matlab-uipanels
* http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/panel-level-uicontrols

Thanks for all your great workarounds.

I tried your last suggestion and indeed the uipanel becomes invisible. However, if the panel has any children then this does not appear to work. Is this something you have observed? I have basically been stuck on R2014a for years now because I can’t find a solution.

My application uses uipanels as GIS layers so they need to be transparent. Of course I could try recoding to just use axes, but the panels allows simpler resizing and moving of the layers and the code is large so would require a lot of work.

I just added an addendum to the main post that explains how to set the uipanel’s background to transparent in HG2 (R2014b onward)

@Martin – I am not aware of a solution to make uipanels transparent in 15b onward

Have you had any thoughts how to add a transparent uipanel to the GUI in recent Matlab versions (post 15a)? I’m using GUILayout toolbox and so all my uicontrols and text labels are positioned on uipanels and I’d like to add a background image to the whole GUI.

Thanks to your other posts I can make various uicontrols and text labels transparent but the same trick doesn’t work with uipanels, so as soon as the uncontrol/label is positioned within a panel the transparency doesn’t work.

Any ideas?

This would be easy if panels could be transparent – but they can’t anymore.

Additionally Patrick’s solution doesn’t work any more because panels ALWAYS clip their contents so that I cannot hide the panel outside the figure and then offset a rectangle to be in the figure. I have wanted panels to clip their controls for ages and now they overdo it. Careful what you wish for…

Any ideas how to simply overlay a rectangle on a figure regardless of what is underneath it?

I now have a solution for my specific problem:
I use for the axes and the buttons a parent panel and create the buttons after the creation of the axes.
If the mouse cursor is in a specific defined area, then the buttons’ visibility property is on, else off.
It seems to work for my problem.

Thanks a lot, nice website!

Best regards,
Chris

@ Yair Altman:
Thank you for the hint. I think that I can’t use Patrick’s solution for my gui problem.
I need a specific position of the panel (with some buttons) on the plot,
because if the mouse cursor of the user is on the panel area then the panel is shown.