st: greek on graphs [Was: One Wish]

[Roger Harbord <roger.harbord@bristol.ac.uk>]

I've wished for this too. Maybe in Stata 10... In the meantime if you really 
must have one or two greek letters on just one or two figures for a journal, 
one hack is to export the graph from Stata as an eps file and then insert a 
bit more postscript code by hand. Clearly far from ideal for routine work 
though.

I found the info at <http://www.tailrecursive.org/postscript/text.html> 
invaluable in figuring out how to do this. Note that all measurements in 
postscript are in points, i.e. 72nds of an inch. You need to find a font 
that's installed on your system that includes greek letters - for Windows 
users there's the "Symbol" font. You also need to figure out what the 
corresponding character is in standard ASCII e.g. using "Character Map" 
utility in Windows (Start -> Run -> charmap). You then insert a few lines of 
postscript before the "showpage" command at the very end of the file.

e.g. to add an alpha and a theta to my graph, i inserted :

%%% start hack to add greek letters %%%
/Symbol findfont   	% "Symbol" font includes greek letters
10 scalefont            % font size in points
setfont
newpath
100 72 moveto
(a) show                % alpha
150 80 moveto
(q) show                % theta
%%% end hack to add greek letters  %%%%

The precise positioning (100 72 for alpha and 150 80 for theta) was 
trial-and-error, although taking a ruler to a print-out gives you a good 
starting point.

Luckily i didn't need any hats, which would appear possible (suitable 
characters exist in the Symbol font) but even more fiddly to get the size and 
position right.

Roger.


--On 17 October 2006 16:04 +0200 Maarten Buis <M.Buis@fsw.vu.nl> wrote:


> You're not alone, I would really appreciate such functionality too, but I
> understand that it is not easy. Imagine the number of symbols that people
> might want to include, you already mentioned the Greek alphabet, and
> accents on top of them, add to that all the symbols in bold (for matrices),
> subscripts and superscripts, and all kinds of operators, and it should work
> fine on Unix, Mac, and Windows.

Raphael Fraser wrote :
> I wish Stata graphs title axis could be labeled with mathematical
> Greek symbols (for e.g. chi-squared). If Stata was "pro Greek" it
> would make it possible to label say, a population regression line or a
> fitted line involving beta hat.
>
> That is my wish.
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