st: percent symbols in catplot

[Eric Booth <ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu>]

>

I am using -catplot- (from SSC) on Stata 11 MP for Mac OSX.  I'd like to show the percent sign in the label for each of the category bars when using the "percent" option.

For example, 
****
webuse auto, clear
catplot bar rep78,  percent blabel(bar, position(outside) format(%9.1f)) 
**or**
catplot bar rep78,  by( for)  percent blabel(bar, position(outside) format(%9.1f))
****
shows the percent of each rep78 category out of 100, but I can't get it to show the % sign, so it could say "43.5%", etc.

Using graph editor, I found that I can add a % sign to the bar label text manually (though I'd rather not have to do that for many graphs), but after looking through the barlabel options help documentation, I couldn't figure out how to change the bar label automatically.  (I had the idea that if I could override the bar labels like you can the text for a key in a legend then I could calculate and substitute these values into the -catplot- command in a loop, but I haven't found a way to do this using the barlabel option)

Another option might be to write something that automates those graph recorder grec file changes (ex:  when I add the "%" by hand, it issues the command:

.plotregion1.barlabels[3].text.Arrpush 43.5%

in the recording), but this is a pain.  Any suggestions?

Thanks, 

Eric
__
Eric A. Booth
Public Policy Research Institute
Texas A&M University
ebooth@ppri.tamu.edu
Office: +979.845.6754

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