st: overlapping bars in horizontal vs. vertical bargraphs

[Ernest Berkhout <ernestb@seo.fee.uva.nl>]

Hi all,

playing around with all those beautiful new graphs I can't help to run into 
some kind of state sometimes where the more you dig into the graph-syntax, 
the more questions they raise. The following was not in the manual or 
Statlist archive, so it might be interesting to bring it on here.

It appeared to me that, when using bargraphs with the "bargap(-30)" option, 
the default behaviour with horizontal bars is different then with wertical 
bars. As in the examples in the manual, when overlapping vertical bars the 
last (rightmost) yvar-bar comes on top of the previous ones. This is what I 
personally would like most of the times, for example when plotting values 
of  the years 1990 and 1999 .
But with the same graph plotted horizontally, suddenly the first (upper) 
yvar takes precedence over the second. So for example the bar of the year 
1990 overlaps the bar of 1999. This is not what I want, but I can't find it 
in the manuals how to turn this off. IMHO switching the yvars is not a nice 
option here, as one would read from top to bottom and then first see the 
1999-values and only after that the 1990-values.

- Is it (already) a possible option to have ascending/descending overlap?
- More philosofical: what is Stata's  philosofy behind the different way of 
overlapping between bar and hbar?

I don't think this is really a major point, but of course if it's not hard 
to implement then the extra flexibility would still be welcomed one day.

Ernest Berkhout
Stichting voor Economisch Onderzoek
Universiteit van Amsterdam

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