Re: st: Rectifying y-axis labels using a tiny .scheme

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Ronan's major point is clear and important: you can use schemes to set
your own defaults.

Personal taste is almost everything here. I too tend to prefer -yla(,
ang(h))- almost always, except that you can lose a lot of space if the
numbers are 0.0001 or 0.00001 and you want to show them that way. (I
know you can always change the units of measurement.)

Also, if you -graph combine- various graphs done in this way and some
have longer numbers than others the graphs don't align at all well.

After Stata 8 came out, I used the default default, -s2color-, for
some while, but then switched to setting -s1color-  as the default,
especially in teaching. Students produce graphs using all sorts of
software and I disliked the unevenness in their reports of some
Figures appearing with blue backdrops and some not. Again, Ronan's
point implies that I could have changed that colour in a minor
variation to -s2color-, but shifting to -s1color- did it for me.

Nick

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Ronán Conroy <rconroy@rcsi.ie> wrote:

> For years I have been carefully writing
>
> ylabel(,angle(0)
>
> to ensure that the numbers on the vertical axis of graphs are written horizontally rather than vertically, which is the Stata default.
>
> Recently I came across Vince Wiggins' presentation on writing your own graph schemes, and lo and behold the answer was there.
>
> A tiny scheme file (in my case called rcs2color.scheme) as follows
>
> #include s2color
> anglestyle vertical_tick     horizontal
>
> This makes just one change to the s2color scheme, and now my axes can be read without twisting my neck.
>
> I can only recommend Vince's presentation: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/bocusug06/11.htm

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