Lee Sieswerda
>
> For as long as I've used Stata, a limitation that I thought
> insuperable was
> the production of a fully shaded bar graph. So, for a long
> time, I've
> produced graphs at the darkest semi-shaded level available
> (4), and then
> opened them in a graphics program where I could replace the
> shading with
> something darker. Alternatively, I'm sad to say, I made my
> graphs in Excel
> after producing the appropriate data in Stata. An
> irritation, to be sure,
> but one I've grown accustomed to. Well, I was quite
> surprised this morning
> when I tried Nick Cox's fabulous program -tabhbar- and
> discovered that when
> I specify the option -shading(4)- I get bars that are
> actually fully shaded.
> After a bit of testing, here is the relationship that I found:
>
> tabhbar, shading(2) = graph, shading(3)
> tabhbar, shading(3) = graph, shading(4)
> tabhbar, shading(4) = no equivalent using -graph-
>
> So, my question: is it just me, or do others get the same results?
>
My inclination is the other way round,
as I like totally unshaded bars, a lot!
(Or even no bars at all, but that is a different story.)
Note that -tabhbar- is a wrapper
for -hbar- which for bar shadings just calls
gph box ... <shading>
The documentation for -gph- refers
to shadings 0 1 2 3 4.
The documentation for -grcolor-
refers to shadings 1 2 3 4.
At least with Stata 7 for Windows XP,
on what I think is a fairly standard PC,
I agree with Lee that
gph box ... 4
is darker than you get with
graph ... bar sh(4)
I conjecture that
shading to -gph- = (shading to -graph, bar()-) - 1
and that the very darkest
shading available via -gph- is not used
by -graph, bar()-.
At the opposite end, -hbar- and thus
-tabhbar- allows a shading of . (think
missing) which gives you an unshaded bar.
This is implemented with -hbar- as just
drawing the 4 bounding lines defining
a rectangle and is idiosyncratic to -hbar-.
This isn't clear from the help file for
-hbar- as read in Stata 7, as Stata 7 (for
once) misreads the help file written
for Stata 6.
Nick
[email protected]
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