RE: st: RE: x axis forest plot

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

I have never used -metan-. But it seems that you are instructing the program to put the text "0" against the number . (missing). -graph- is complaining about that. 

I can simulate that error

. sysuse auto
(1978 Automobile Data)

. scatter mpg weight, xla(2000 "big" . "very big")
invalid label specifier, :  2000 "big" . "very big":
r(198);

but I can't say whether this is a consequence of your data or of -metan-. But people who use -metan- now have more evidence. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Vincent de Jonge

one of the commands I used was:

metan a b c d, label(namevar=Author) by(HQ) random rr xlabel(0,1,5) force

with this error:
invalid label specifier, :  0 "1" . "0" 0 "1" 1.6094379124341 "5":

or
metan a b c d, label(namevar=Author) by(HQ) random rr xlabel(0,1,5)
invalid label specifier, :  0 "1" . "0" 0 "1" 1.6094379124341 "5":

is that of any help?

on 07-10-2010 14:48 Nick Cox said the following:

> -metan- is a user-written command (SSC). 
> 
> It usually helps and never hurts if you show exact code that you tried. 
> 
> In general with a graphics command you can not omit data points from a graph by truncating the axis scale. You must omit data explicitly e.g. by using -if-. 
> 
> -xaxis()- and -xlabel()- are options, not commands. 
 
Vincent de Jonge
 
> I did a meta-analysis on count data using the db 
> metan command and plotted a forest plot. However, to improve readability 
> I would like to limit the x axis. This just won't work. I don't know how 
> to do it. Tried commands like xaxis, xlabel, etc. but always get an 
> error. Hope someone can get me the answer.

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