Programming with the -gph- command, illustrated via forest plots
| Speaker |
Peter Sasieni, Imperial Cancer
Research Fund, London |
Stata's low-level graphics command gph offers tremendous
flexibility to produce graphs for special purposes. Two examples are the
graphics for seasonal data presented by Nick Cox at last years meeting and
forest plots for meta analysis included in two recent STB submissions. As
with any new programming language, writing a complete program from scratch can
be daunting, and it is best to start by adapting someone elses efforts. An
additional difficulty in using gph is that all Stata's normal
text output is suppressed so that error messages are lost and debugging becomes
problematic.
In this talk, I shall outline how I set about adapting an existing ado file to
produce the graphs that I wanted for a particular application. The graph
produced by the new program will, if necessary, be automatically scaled so that
it can be printed in magnified form without the need for special paper.
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