What can you tell me about the Windows 98 operating system and dialogs?

Question:

A graphics dialog box is not working right on my Windows system. What is going on, and what can I do?

Answer:

Unfortunately, some operating systems (Windows 98 and its offshoots, such as Windows ME) have restrictions on the number of GUI controls, and this affects Stata’s graphics dialogs. If you try to run a dialog that is too large, or if you have too many other applications running, some of the controls will not appear, and the dialog will not look or work correctly. We had to create special smaller dialogs for these operating systems.

If you are using such a platform, Stata automatically loads the Windows 98 version of a given dialog if it exists. For example, if you execute the command db twoway_overlay, you will get the dialog from twoway_overlay_98.dlg.

Sometimes, however, even this dialog will not work right. You can use the command set smalldlg on to tell Stata to automatically use the smallest dialogs it can find. Stata will always look for a _98s version of a dialog and run it if it is available. The command set smalldlg on works only with Windows 98-type platforms.

If you only want to run one particular small dialog without changing your settings, you can type db from the command line. This will work regardless of which platform you are using. For example, to get the smallest version of twoway_overlay.dlg you type db twoway_overlay_98s, which tells Stata to execute the dialog in twoway_overlay_98s.dlg. There are 66 other similarly named graphics dialogs with a _98s extension, from ac_98s.dlg to xcorr_98s.dlg.

If you are a dialog programmer, you do not need to worry about this unless you are using several graphics include tabs in one dialog or you are making a monster dialog of a similar size as the graphics dialogs. To make your code work on a Windows 98 platform you, will have to reduce the number of dialog controls.

If you are using the graphics include tabs, use the smallest versions you can find. The instructions from Using StataCorp-written graphics .idlg files FAQ are good, but the smallest include files are

        gxaxis_98s.idlg
        gyaxis_98s.idlg
        gtitle_98s.idlg
        gregion_98s.idlg which uses gregion_common_98s.idlg
                                    gregion_common_98s_sc.idlg
        glegend_98s.idlg
        gby_98s.idlg

There is no gcaption_98s.idlg; captions and notes are not used for Windows 98-type systems. The command that goes in the PROGRAM command block is unchanged from that in its larger counterpart. For example, for gxaxis_98s.idlg, you insert the text

        put " " /program gxaxis_output

You can see an example of these small dialog include files in graphfaq_98s.dlg.