There is no need to write off adding noise yourself
as a "manual" solution. This should be easily programmable,
and without action from StataCorp, so why not do that to get
what you want?
Alternatively, there are other solutions to get a
neat display of repeated values, by stacking not
jittering. I have found that jittering often has two disadvantages:
1. It can be tricky to get exactly what you want, because
of the randomness.
2. Lots of people seem not to have heard of jittering, so
with some audiences you have to go into explanations.
Stacking needs far less explanation.
Stacking is precisely what -dotplot- does. If you don't like the way
that -dotplot- offers you control of the binning, then
-stripplot- from SSC is an alternative.
David Airey
The jitter option in Stata graphs adds user controlled amounts of
spherical noise to plotted data, useful for categorical data plots to
prevent overprinting. But when only the X axis of a plot is
categorical, I don't necessarily want to add scatter in my Y axis. I
just want to add scatter in the X axis. It would be nice to have the
jitter option take two arguments, one for X and one for Y, say,
scatter y x, jitter(0 7)
to jitter the x axis only.
I know I can manually add some amount of random noise to a new
generated variable of X and plot that, but making the jitter option
do the above would be more desirable for me!
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