How do I add a caret over a Greek letter in graph text?

[Michael Anbar]

In Latex, \hat{\beta} displays beta with a caret above it. How can I do this in the text on a graph? I know I can put {&beta} to put the Greek letter into title, subtitle, etc. using SMCL, but I don't see anything in the manual about formatting like this, even in -help graph_text##smcl-. Is this possible?

[Malcolm Wardlaw]

If your Stata version is Unicode compatible (which I believe all recent Stata instances are) you should just use the uncode symbols. Beta-Hat is this: β̂ which is U+03B2 plus U+0302 (combining circumflex accent). Put that in your title or label or whatever. It works.

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic.../3b2/index.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...0302/index.htm

[Dimitriy V. Masterov]

You can combine unicode codes for a greek letter and combining circumflex accent like this:

sysuse auto, clear
reg price mpg weight
margins, dydx(*)
marginsplot, title(`=ustrunescape("\u03B1\u0302")' or even `=ustrunescape("\u03B2\u0302")')

[Michael Anbar]

You can combine unicode codes for a greek letter and combining circumflex accent like this:

sysuse auto, clear
reg price mpg weight
margins, dydx(*)
marginsplot, title(`=ustrunescape("\u03B1\u0302")' or even `=ustrunescape("\u03B2\u0302")')

Hmmm, it looks like this might not be possible then. Combining the Unicode code and the circumflex accent doesn't put the caret over the letter, but rather next to it, which isn't accurate and doesn't look good.

[Malcolm Wardlaw]

Hmmm, it looks like this might not be possible then. Combining the Unicode code and the circumflex accent doesn't put the caret over the letter, but rather next to it, which isn't accurate and doesn't look good.

I'm guessing you are doing this in Windows rather than a *nix box. This is a font issue. You're probably using the default Arial font, which has terrible Unicode support. Windows Arial doesn't support the combining circumflex. Arial Unicode MS will, but the results are hit or miss. If you're serious about it, you just need to use a default font with good Unicode support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicod..._Unicode_fonts

[Dimitriy V. Masterov]

This worked for me on both a Mac and an Ubuntu box. I don't have access to a Windows machine that has Stata on it to test out Malcolm's solution.

[Malcolm Wardlaw]

This worked for me on both a Mac and an Ubuntu box. I don't have access to a Windows machine that has Stata on it to test out Malcolm's solution.

I work almost exclusively in OSX, but I've had enough cross platform issues with encoding problems with co-authors, I've learned to guess about these things. I was curious, so I remoted into a Windows server I have access to. This is sure enough what's going on. In fact, my little Unicode paste β̂ in the post above doesn't even render properly in IE8. My guess is that since UTF8 is such a strong part of the *nix legacy, the native Unicode font behavior in OSX and Linux is more uniform.

Arial Unicode MS works sort of as expected, but while the alpha character looks fine the "hat" appears to clip into beta character. I don't have admin rights to the server, so I can't install any other other fonts to check them, but my guess is that there must be some decent serif and sans-serif fonts which give good behavior under Windows. Check the following page on the issue for font suggestions.

http://unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html#12b

[Michael Anbar]

Malcolm Wardlaw You're right that this is a font issue. The plots look fine on my machine at home (a Linux box), but my office workstation runs Windows, and that's where the problem occurs. I'll talk to IT and see what fonts they are willing to install.