Stata graphic defaults mysteriously changing?

[Daniel Cohen]

Two years ago I wrote a lot of code in Stata (v17) for a project, both on a Windows and a Linux machine. All was well and my figures looked the same regardless of which machine I produced them on (as you'd hope). I'm now returning to the code two years later on an OS X machine, and the graphic defaults seem to have subtly changed in a way that ruins all my figures. For example, legends are all appearing at 3 o'clock instead of 6 o'clock and all text is at least one size too large. I'll fix these issues manually if I have to, but it doesn't instill much confidence from a replication perspective. Has anyone else seen this? I don't think it's version-dependent because I ran my code with `version 17` and it still had the same issue. Would appreciate any insight.

[George Ford]

Interesting. I know with MS Word, when an OS machine touches the document, the formatting is ruined.

Did you run the Stata code on a Windows machine as a check?

[Nick Cox]

In Stata 18 using a previous version as in

version 17: some graphics command

does not itself change the graphics scheme. So, if you fire up Stata 18 and do not set the graphics scheme yourself you get the new default scheme stcolor.

Does that explain what you're seeing? Operating system should not itself be an issue.

[Daniel Cohen]

In Stata 18 using a previous version as in

version 17: some graphics command

does not itself change the graphics scheme. So, if you fire up Stata 18 and do not set the graphics scheme yourself you get the new default scheme stcolor.

Does that explain what you're seeing? Operating system should not itself be an issue.

Amazing! Thanks for clarifying -- this was indeed the issue, and resetting the graphic scheme from the new `stcolor` to the old `s2color` seems to have fixed it. Thank you!

[Nick Cox]

Cross-posted with same answer at https://www.reddit.com/r/stata/comme...usly_changing/