st: Re: bold text in graphs

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Bolding, italicizing, etc. is achieved in PostScript by switching  
fonts. At the lowest level, your computer has a Times font, a Times- 
Italic font, a Times-Bold font, a Times-SmallCaps font, etc. and when  
you specify one of those in a document it is switching fonts.

Stata graphs have the disadvantage of being rendered in a single  
font. That is why the oft-voiced complaint that you can't include  
Greek letters (unless you want to use Greek everywhere), because it  
would require using both, e.g., Times and Symbol on the same graph.

So I do not think you can get away with including bold text on a  
Stata graph, or easily tweak the resulting PostScript to modify it  
thusly. This would obviously be a very useful feature for the Graph  
Editor (Vince, are you there?)


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


On Dec 5, 2007, at 2:33 AM, statalist-digest wrote:


> Does anyone know how text is bolded in postscript?  Is it some sort of
> ASCII character sequence?  I'm thinking that if there is some ASCII
> sequence like this, while it may have no effect on the Stata graph, it
> might survive the "graph export" translation to postscript.
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