RE: st: RE: Features for Stata 14

[Timothy Mak <tshmak@hku.hk>]

Personally I don't think some of the features I requested are realistic for Stata 14 - transparency in graphics is one of them, but I thought I'd say it anyway, since it's just a "wish list". Nick Cox queried about #6, as to why I didn't just use a -if- qualifier. -if- works if I'm only plotting a scatter graph. If it's a line graph or area graph where I want to clip (or crop) some of the plot region, that cannot be easily done. I note that in the meta-analysis program -metan-, the authors have already anticipated this kind of cropping for forest plots, in that if one of the studies has huge confidence intervals, -metan- will not change the scale of the plot just to accommodate that one study, but instead draws arrows for that particular "tree" to indicate that its width exceeds the indicated range of the axis. If I have the time, I can probably write a wrapper program for -twoway- that does that more generally. 

On another note, I've found it somewhat annoying that you can't use -struct- interactively in mata (even though you can with -class-). Perhaps something for Stata 14 too? 

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of William Buchanan
Sent: 10 September 2013 18:55
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: RE: Features for Stata 14

Kind of along the lines of what Timothy mentioned in #5, I wonder what the feasibility of integrating (La)TeX within Stata would be?  If we could export some graphics (in particular I'm thinking of SEM graphics) to any one of several graphics packages in LaTeX it would surely make for much nicer looking output and provide additional capacity for end users to further customize things on a lower level.  Given how many Stata users also seem to be users of (La)TeX, this could also provide more users with greater flexibility when it comes to adding specialized text to graphics and/or generating more complex output that may or may not be currently or easily supported by user-written commands.  

Again, I'm not sure how feasible, if at all, this is, but it would definitely be an interesting addition.  

With regards to Tim's #3, if transparency is included maybe it would be possible to create a different flavor of graph combine (similar to using multiple calls to -twoway-) where the user could layer multiple graphs on top of one another in a single graph region?  

Hopefully this discussion will give StataCorp some good ideas early on in the development phase.  And although they typically don't comment on things under development until the next release, it would be really great if some of the StataCorp folks could comment on the feasibility of implementing some of these things within a single development cycle (e.g., it wouldn't be possible/practical to do X because it would require redesigning the entire graphics engine while still maintaining backwards compatibility with old graph files, but could be accomplished as a longer term goal).  There are probably lots of things that users would like, but many of us probably don't appreciate the true magnitude of our requests and hearing back from the StataCorp folks could probably make it easier for users to understand that and try to figure out ways to work around the current limitations.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 9, 2013, at 21:55, Timothy Mak <tshmak@hku.hk> wrote:

> Sorry for jumping on this Features bandwagon rather late. 
> 
> But my wishes are: 
> 
> 1. A system macro that gives the directory of the executing do-file. This feature has been asked for in a number of recent posts, and it would make organizing do-files so much easier. see e.g. http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2013-07/msg00667.html 
> 2. A dock-able do-file editor and graphics windows, like Matlab. 
> 3. Improvements to graphics, in particular, a better -graph combine- command, and transparency. See e.g. http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2013-06/msg00967.html 
> 4. More flexible legend keys: if you draw a -twoway- graph with both a -connect- and a -rcap- option, e.g. for displaying confidence intervals, your legend key can only refer to either the -connect- line or the -rcap- line, but not both at the same time. Likewise with -connect- and -rarea-. 
> 5. Support for accents such as \hat{}, and \dot{} in graphics (+ UNICODE support?)
> 6. Allow users to over-ride data-dependent axis limits. Currently, we cannot force the axes to have a smaller range than the actual data range. But surely if people want such a graph, it should be possible. A warning message may be all that is necessary. 
> 7. Allow axes to include "chinks" to indicate a change of scale. 
> 
> Tim
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of William Buchanan
> Sent: 02 September 2013 23:00
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: st: Features for Stata 14
> 
> Since it is still fairly early in the development cycle for the next release of Stata, I thought it might be good to start a thread about things that people would like to see added to the next release.  
> 
> I would definitely be interested in seeing some updates/expansions to the graphics capabilities of Stata.  Alpha level blending is something that has come up several times and adding interactive graphics would be a great addition to the existing commands (e.g., functionality that is common in Tableau and several packages in R).  
> 
> Documentation of the lower level graphics commands to make it easier for users to extend the graphics capabilities.  
> 
> Latent Class Analysis and Latent Transition Analysis with support for all types of manifest variables.
> 
> Multivariate mixed-effects models 
> 
> Exploratory Factor Analysis with nominal/ordinal/non-normal variables
> 
> Improved debugging tools (e.g., stepwise evaluator for programs, more informative error messages, etc...)
> 
> New ways to generate samples of data with specified correlation structures/distributions
> 
> I'm curious to see what other people have to say on this topic as well.
> 
> Billy
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
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