Stata graphics, under the hood

Abstract

Stata's graphics are more flexible than many realise. We will exploit this flexibility and explore a potpourri of topics, some of interest to all graphers and others primarily of interest to those creating highly customised graphs or new graph commands. Among the topics will be creating custom schemes to control the appearance of graphs, including an overview of the format and contents of scheme files. We will also examine twoway graphs as a platform for creating custom graphs, some of which are not readily apparent. We will discuss techniques for managing data and leveraging twoway's native plottypes. Along the way we will introduce some new official and unofficial tools, and perhaps some downright dangerous, but useful, undocumented tricks.