Re: st: eliminate blank marginal space with - graph, aspectratio(1) -

[Michael Hanson <mshanson@mac.com>]

On Feb 2, 2009, at 2:24 PM, Jacob Wegelin wrote:

> Often I want to create a graph to export as a pdf or eps, for
> inclusion in a manuscript. The problem is that, although a command
> such as
>
> twoway (scatter y x) (line myfit x), aspectratio(1)
> graph export somegraph.pdf, replace
>
> produces a pretty plot, it is surrounded by a lot of blank marginal
> space to the left and right of the plot or above and below the plot.
> Of course, one could doctor up the resulting image in Photoshop or
> some image editing program. But doctoring in Photoshop has the
> following disadvantages:
>
> (1) it simply would be more elegant if one could produce, directly
> from Stata, a "tight" graphic with no wasted marginal blank space.
> Perhaps more important,
>
> (2) an image doctored in Photoshop is merely a collection of pixels,
> no longer a vector object.
>
> I've tried messing around with the -xsize- and -ysize- options but
> these do not seem to provide any unambiguous way to eliminate blank
> space.
>
> I'm working in Stata/MP 10.1 on a MacBook Pro 10.5.5 with 2GHz Intel
> Core 2 Duo and 4GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Jacob:

I would recommend generating your graph as an EPS file rather than  
PDF.  That will tend to give tighter bounds around the actual plot,  
and you can tweak some of the settings as explained in -help  
eps_options-.  (For the record, however, I have never been able to  
get the -fontface- option to be recognized on OS X.)  In my  
experience, the large margins are intrinsic to all graph exports to  
PDF from Stata, regardless of what options you might change.

Once your .eps file exists, open it in Preview on your MBP.  That  
will allow you to convert it to PDF -- which will retain the vector  
properties of the image -- and make any additional editing that you  
need.  If you save the edited image as a .pdf file, it is easy to  
include the graphic in a variety of formats, including LaTeX  
documents or certain word processors (such as Pages).  I haven't used  
Microsoft Word myself in a number of years, so I am not sure if a  
pasted vector image is converted by Word (but I have some vague  
recollection that others on the list have had some difficulties with  
that).

Hope that helps,
Mike

P.S.  You could, of course, export to PDF and then edit directly in  
Preview, but typically I find that is not necessary to change the  
margins if the original file is in EPS format.  Also, you could use a  
command-line tool (epstopdf) to convert from EPS to PDF -- I believe  
this has been discussed on Statalist before.

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