st: RE: Features for Stata 14

[Timothy Mak <tshmak@hku.hk>]

Sorry for jumping on this Features bandwagon rather late. 

But my wishes are: 

1. A system macro that gives the directory of the executing do-file. This feature has been asked for in a number of recent posts, and it would make organizing do-files so much easier. see e.g. http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2013-07/msg00667.html 
2. A dock-able do-file editor and graphics windows, like Matlab. 
3. Improvements to graphics, in particular, a better -graph combine- command, and transparency. See e.g. http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2013-06/msg00967.html 
4. More flexible legend keys: if you draw a -twoway- graph with both a -connect- and a -rcap- option, e.g. for displaying confidence intervals, your legend key can only refer to either the -connect- line or the -rcap- line, but not both at the same time. Likewise with -connect- and -rarea-. 
5. Support for accents such as \hat{}, and \dot{} in graphics (+ UNICODE support?)
6. Allow users to over-ride data-dependent axis limits. Currently, we cannot force the axes to have a smaller range than the actual data range. But surely if people want such a graph, it should be possible. A warning message may be all that is necessary. 
7. Allow axes to include "chinks" to indicate a change of scale. 

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of William Buchanan
Sent: 02 September 2013 23:00
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: Features for Stata 14

Since it is still fairly early in the development cycle for the next release of Stata, I thought it might be good to start a thread about things that people would like to see added to the next release.  

I would definitely be interested in seeing some updates/expansions to the graphics capabilities of Stata.  Alpha level blending is something that has come up several times and adding interactive graphics would be a great addition to the existing commands (e.g., functionality that is common in Tableau and several packages in R).  

Documentation of the lower level graphics commands to make it easier for users to extend the graphics capabilities.  

Latent Class Analysis and Latent Transition Analysis with support for all types of manifest variables.

Multivariate mixed-effects models 

Exploratory Factor Analysis with nominal/ordinal/non-normal variables

Improved debugging tools (e.g., stepwise evaluator for programs, more informative error messages, etc...)

New ways to generate samples of data with specified correlation structures/distributions

I'm curious to see what other people have to say on this topic as well.

Billy

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