Greek letters and carets in Stata graphs

[Jeff Wooldridge]

I have a couple of problems. First, when I use the Stata imbed commands for Greek fonts, the Greek characters look fine in the graph but then they become question marks when I copy to a Scientific Word 5.5 document. (Yes, some of us still use it!) Moreover, I have never succeeded in putting decorations over anything, including a Greek character.

The solution I found here https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-in-graph-text doesn't work for me, and it seems clunky even if it did. Has there been an update on this with more recent versions of Stata?

[Sebastian Kripfganz]

I have had the same issue when I inserted a Stata graph as an eps figure in a LaTeX document. I did not find a solution yet and would also be keen to learn a solution.

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

eps does not support Unicode. So if your graph contains Unicode characters beyond ASCII and need to work with LaTex, export it to PDF.

I have not used Scientific Word for years, so do not know if they now support embedding PDF file. If yes, that would the route. Or if you do not have to have vector graphic format, i.e., your journal allows bitmap formats like PNG, that will be another route.

[Jared Greathouse]

I can't comment on the Scientific Word angle since there's a pretty good chance I wasn't alive or old enough to remember it when it came out/was used.

But..... on my end,

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

Does work for me. What happens when you try on your end, does it not work in Stata or does it not work in Scientific Word? Jeff Wooldridge

[John Mullahy]

What would be desirable (albeit probably not easy to do) would be to have SMCL markup directives analogous to

{sub} {sup}

that allowed one to put characters over or under the preceding character. E.g.

b{backover:^} or x{backover:-} or z{backunder:~}

An item perhaps for the v18 wishlist?

[Jeff Wooldridge]

I agree, John. This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for but didn't find.

Jared: That code likely works in the title of the paper, but I couldn't get something similar to work when I started up the graph editor to fill in text descriptions within the graph. Probably I made a mistake. I can't show code because it's within the graph editor.

[Andrew Musau]

but I couldn't get something similar to work when I started up the graph editor to fill in text descriptions within the graph. Probably I made a mistake. I can't show code because it's within the graph editor.

You can add text in twoway type graphs using the -text()- option. It is certainly possible to add hats, bars and other decorations, but this requires you to fiddle with text positions. I therefore also second John's suggestion of introducing this capability. Here is an example:

sysuse auto, clear
scatter mpg weight, scheme(s1mono)

Looking at the graph, there is space to add text at the (y, x) pair (30, 4000). So we can add text including the Greek letter \(\beta\) and a second text adding a hat on top.

sysuse auto, clear
set scheme s1mono
scatter mpg weight, text(30 4000 "`=ustrunescape("\u03b2")'= some value") text(30.5 3729 "`=ustrunescape("\u0302")'") 

[Jeff Wooldridge]

That's clever, Andrew! Unfortunately, it looks like it could take some time to get the text exactly where I wanted, with arrows pointing to specific pieces of text. Plus, I'm still not sure what will happen if I it into a Sci Word file. Being able to do what John suggested inside the graph editor would be idea.

[John Mullahy]

Since Andrew and Jeff also feel that it may be worth exploring I'll put my idea in #5 in the version 18 wishlist thread.

[Bert Lloyd]

Prof. Wooldridge,

Can you be more specific about how you are producing the graphs and how you are getting them into SWP? That could be part of the issue. For example, you mention copying into SWP, that may work differently than importing them through the menus.

I haven't used SWP in a long time, but in LyX (which is similar but free and IMO better) there can be benefits to using the drop-down menus to import graphics rather than a quick copy-paste.

[Jeff Wooldridge]

Thanks Bert. I will try importing using the drop-down menu. I'm getting lazy ....

[Fei Jia]

Not sure if this is still relevant today but I find no quick solutions when I am trying to solve similar issues today. The font Cambria Math is what I find usable on a win10 PC. I am using Stata18


sysuse auto, clear
reg price mpg weight
margins, dydx(*)
global sigmahat2 "`=ustrunescape("\u03C3\u0302")'{subscript:2}"
global sigmatilde2 "`=ustrunescape("\u03C3\u0303")'{subscript:2}"
global betahat2 "`=ustrunescape("\u03B2\u0302")'{subscript:2}"
global betatilde2 "`=ustrunescape("\u03B2\u0303")'{subscript:2}"
marginsplot, title($betahat2 $betatilde2 $sigmahat2 $sigmatilde2)