st: Re: special characters in Stata graphics

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Thanks to Chinh for these cogent explanations. I wholly agree that it  
would be a good idea to ditch MacRoman text encoding in favor of  
ISO-8859-1. I have that option in my text editor (as well as the  
option to save files with Unix line endings) and it is very useful.

I would like to have a response to the broader issue raised in my  
message. It is not acceptable to produce, e.g., graphs in Stata that  
must be edited by some kludge downstream to contain UTF-8 characters  
that are not available in the ISO-8859-1 charset (such as the Greek  
alphabet, mathematical symbols, etc.) We need UTF-8 (broadly,  
Unicode) handling to make graphs fully presentation-quality. We can  
get around this for tables as routines like Ben Jann's -estout- can  
write TeX, including the TeX codes for all desired characters (sorry,  
you MS Word devotees have some manual work to do). But for graphics,  
UTF-8/Unicode support is really necessary.


Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


On Dec 14, 2006, at 2:33 AM, statalist-digest wrote:


> Apple has a new font API in later versions of Mac OS X that we may  
> be able to
> use to get a list of available fixed-width fonts.  But that could  
> mean dropping
> support for earlier versions of Mac OS X so this method may have to  
> be saved
> for a future release.  Either way, we'll look into it.
>
> <character mappings deleted>
>
>
> > > is Windows-specific. These are not the correct mappings for
> > Mac OS X.
> We're probably going to make Stata for Macintosh use the ISOLatin1  
> text
> encoding in the future rather than the default Mac Roman text  
> encoding to get
> some consistency across all the platforms we support (Windows and  
> Unix both
> use ISOLatin1).  We can't do it now because this will screw up  
> datasets saved
> on the Mac that contain 8-bit ASCII characters when read back into  
> the Mac.
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