Alter Stata graphing scheme

Question

From a panel data set I am graphing time series for a high number of countries, by country.

For each country, the graph code is as follows:

twoway (tsline spread if Cntry == 1) (tsline bidask if Cntry == 1, yaxis(3)) (tsline debt if Cntry == 1, yaxis(2) name(country1) title(Austria))

I need to alter several features of the graphs, such as

change font of title to medium large
change font of legends of X and my 3 Y Axis to small
change number of ticks on my X-axis
change angle of X-Axis legend

Instead of altering the code for each of my ids, is there a way to modify an official Stata scheme directly?

Yes. Start with help schemes. The strategy should be to create your own scheme using one of the built-in schemes as a base. — Roberto Ferrer
Robert, I have been already on help schemes. However, it does not proove very helpful for this question. Would you have any other direction I could take? — user3864435

Roberto Ferrer Roberto Ferrer · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-23T14:31:53

I'll try to show how you can go about creating your own scheme. This does not imply however, that a personalized scheme is the only solution to your problem. There may be other, more direct ways of handling that. Moreover, this is how I have done it in the past, so better ways should be possible.

Install a user-written scheme. This will be saved in your ado/plus directory (use sysdir to check where Stata system directories point to). One such scheme can be obtained running
```
net install gr0002_3, from(http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj4-3)
```
This will install the lean1 and lean2 schemes, by Svend Juul.
Open up the file that defines one of these schemes. Run, for example:
```
viewsource scheme-lean2.scheme
```
Open up a built-in scheme using
```
viewsource scheme-s2mono.scheme
```
(This shows that schemes are named as scheme-<somename>.scheme.)
Inspect and compare. Noticeably, the use of #include <someotherscheme> allows us to make modifications based on previous, tested schemes.
Make use of these examples to write your own scheme. Many configurable options are described in the manual entries [G-3] Options and [G-4] Styles, concepts, and schemes. Use that also.

The source files may be overwhelming, but if you run

viewsource scheme-lean1.scheme

you can see that the strategy of using #include can make up for what seems to be tedious programming. Your personalized scheme can be as simple as required.

Alter Stata graphing scheme

2 Answers