Thank you Sergiy for writing some of these things up.
Firstly with regard my comments on the 'hypothetical manager', I am not a businessperson myself, so I'm not all that familiar with what goes on out there, but my point is simply - there's a lot that goes on outside the academic world, and it's worthwhile to try and keep up with it. I don't suggest for a minute that Stata should incorporate all those features, but it's good to know what other people are up to. And I think Wilkinson is suggesting that statistical graphics is a huge area that's being developed independent of statisticians.
But much more has been written concerning my comparison of Stata and R graphics capability. In fact I don't have a graphics manual, which probably explains my ignorance for a lot of the graphical features. Thank you Maarten for pointing out that ring(0) actually allows you to put your legend inside the graph - that's useful to know. I did look up ring in the help menu, but I didn't see it as implying the unique feature of ring(0). Another problem I don't see how you can overcome is how to get your texts to split into a few lines. But chances are I just don't know. However, I maintain that the axis limit limitation has NOT been solved. Here's some simple R code to produce a simple graph. It illustrates the axis limitation problem I was referring to as well as the other problems I allude to in this email.
x <- 0:10
y <- c(1,1,1,1.5, 2,3,4,4,4.5,5,98)
y2 <- c(0,0,0.5,1.5,2,1.5,2,4,8,9,9)
plot(x,y,type="b",ylim=c(0,10), xlab="This is the number of days \n since a particular day")
lines(x,y2,type="b",col="red")
legend(0,10,legend=c("Line 1","Line 2 is really long. So I'd like", "to split it into two lines"),col=c("black","red","white"),lwd=1)
My concern with the 'undocumented' nature of the Stata graphics command is that I believed, perhaps ignorantly, that you can only create new graphics commands using the commands that you can find under -help graph-. For example, without using -graph pie-, is there any way that you can program your own pie chart? My apology for my ignorance, but I hope my post is not entirely useless.
Tim
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