Re: st: create pretty charts

[Joerg Luedicke <joerg.luedicke@gmail.com>]

If you have a 2d plot which shows exactly the information you want it
to show, then coercing this plot into 3d has the consequence that you
add visual information to the picture -- with no correspondence to the
('real') information that is supposed to be shown. What happens then
is that a viewer of that plot has to figure out that the additional
visual information that comes with the 3d plot actually does not bear
any real information. Once (s)he figured that out (s)he essentially
translated the 3d plot into a 2d plot in order to then process the
relevant real information. This is a source of confusion (if something
went wrong during the translation, for example) and a waste of time.
So the question is: why do you want to confuse your readers and waste
their time? That might make sense in some fields like journalism where
this can be regarded as some kind of collateral damage which may be
unavoidable in order to catch a reader's attention in the first place.
However, in the game of science, these kind of shenanigans should be
unnecessary.

J.

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 9:43 AM, tashi lama <ltashi32@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>     I think Stata does heck of a job creating great graphs/charts. My supervisor is not quite bought on that and wants pretty looking, visually appealing 3D graphs/charts. Does anyone know any intermediary software that takes my charts/graphs created by stata and produces prettier looking charts, say for instance 3D charts? Any help or hint would be highly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Tashi
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