st: defining new colors or scheming too hard

[Bill Rising <brising@louisville.edu>]

Hello people,

I'd like to define a scheme, call it 'foo', to be able to easily switch 
the looks of graphs using something like

-graph use nicegraph, scheme(foo)-

When I went to poke through the scheme s2color.scheme, I found the 
following chunk of code:

---------------------------- cut here ----------------------------
color background  ltbluishgray
color foreground  black
* do NOT use "r g b" numbers for background and foreground
---------------------------- cut here ----------------------------

This gives the appearance that only named colors can be used for 
background and foreground colors. Unfortunately, there is no named 
color which matches the background color I'd like to use (this is just 
the first of the colors which need to be changed). Not only does "r g 
b" fail, but trying something like -red*.1- also fails.

This brings me to my question: is there a way to define new named 
colors? This seems possible by looking through the color.class file, 
but my class programming skills are weak enough that I'm not sure how 
the color name would be made persistent.

I tried searching all the text files from the mother ship (i.e. in all 
subdirectories of /Path_to_Stata/Stata/ado) for the text ltbluishgray, 
but found nothing which would show where the color was defined.

Perhaps I'm going about this all wrong, and I should instead satisfy 
myself with manual overrides of the background and foreground colors. 
I'd rather use schemes, however, because the series of graphs I'm 
trying to tweak are used in various media (presentation, paper, poster, 
etc.), and it would be safer and nicer to use schemes to switch between 
media.

Any hints or other viewpoints about how to approach this problem would 
be much appreciated.

Bill Rising
System: Mac OS X 10.3.5
Stata: 8.2 born on October 5, 2004

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