st: Changing line color for more than 20 overlaid twoway line plots

[Roth Florian <Florian.Roth@unilu.ch>]

Dear All,

I am trying to make a number of overlaid twoway line plots for a variable (e.g. var1-var22) in a wide panel data set. 
For this I use the Stata command:

 	. twoway line var1-var22 Year

Now, I would like to change the line color of var2-var22 to grey and the line of var1 to black. So I use:

	. twoway line var1-var22 Year, lcolor(black gs10 ...)

I then get the error:

	. p21(line(color(blue)) area(linestyle(color(blue)))):  too many arguments

It seem as if lcolor does not allow for more than 20 arguments. 

Now, I could transform my data to long format and use - xtline - with options - overlay - and -plot#opts() -
but then I would have to set the color for every line separately. This is not very practical because I would like to 
make the same plot for many different data sets with a varying number of line plots overlaid.

I care only about visually distinguishing var1 from the rest. So maybe there is a way to threat var2-var22 as a group.
Or is there any other way to change the line color for a number of overlaid line plots.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,
Florian

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