Re: st: RE: draw 3D pie and 3D bar

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

3D bar graphs can be just as bad. That usually means bars presented
with base an inclined plane. But then bars at the back are usually
occluded at least in part by bars at the front, and bar heights (for
3D bar charts are in practice vertical, not horizontal) cannot easily
be compared because they have different base points and/or because
which of front and back of bar is to be read off is ambiguous.

Side-by-side bars or dot charts usually work much better. Even stacked
bars can be better.

Note that 3-D graphs might well include surface or persective views of
z = f(x, y). These can sometimes be provocative and I don't include
them in the obloquy.

Nick

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 12:17 AM, David Radwin wrote:
>> Correct, Stata does not create 3-D graphs of any kind. Many Statalisters
>> consider this to be a good thing.
>
> Especially the 3D pie chart is evil. The information presented in a
> pie chart is encoded in the angles of the different slices. In order
> to create the 3D illusion, you need to distort those very angles...
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