Comments on: graphs on the web

By: olderwoman

olderwoman — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:16:51 +0000

Stata’s documentation says it produces PDFs, but apparently not under Windows, per the error message. Re learning curves, I agree Stata has one and that it is particularly steep for Stata graphics, although what I liked when I was learning Stata 10 years ago was that the on-line help and the web user community were (and still are) really helpful. I also learned a lot from a couple of grad students who worked for me. The point is that I’ve already learned Stata and I don’t want to start over. I’m not anti-R, I said if I were just starting out, I’d probably go to it. But I’m not just starting out.

Sounds like someone (not me) could/should pull together a set of recommendations for folks like ebogue.

By: Kieran

Kieran — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:08:00 +0000

There are several separate things here. - If you want a simple point and click application for good for occasionaly producing graphs of data, there are number of free or cheap options available, like Plot for the Mac. - R produces PDFs directly, without any need for conversion programs or what have you. (It can output most other graphics formats as well.) Is it really true that Stata can't procuce PDF files? - Learning curves: Stata's learning curve does not seem to me a whole lot flatter than R's.

By: olderwoman

olderwoman — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:35:03 +0000

E: Is Adobe out of your school’s price range?
J and K: But you still have to get the graphs into a document or web site. This can be a pain unless you can produce PDFs.
Because he mostly writes math, my son uses an open source program (probably an open source version of LaTEX but I forget which) that can generate PDFs. I talked to him about it when I was trying to figure out what would work for my problem, but he told me that it is awkward to import graphics into it so it did not seem worth the bother of trying to learn it.

Because I like Stata and its large user community, have invested in learning to use it, and can afford it (it is quite affordable under university site license agreements) I’m not switching, but if I were young and broke I’d invest the time to move into the open source community. However, those of you in that community should remember the learning-curve issues for newbies. If you are just trying to get one job done on a deadline, point and click is the way to go.

By: Kieran

Kieran — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:42:06 +0000

Your story points to the paucity of affordable software that generates high-quality academic graphs.

R is free and can be used to produce very high quality graphs of data. There’s also GNUplot.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:07:11 +0000

I use the emf (Enhanced MetaFile) rather than wmf format. Both have the advantage of being easily imported into editors like Illustrator for further tweaking. I agree than png in Stata is fuzzy and I don’t know enough about graphics to know why that doesn’t work better.

By: ebogue

ebogue — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:47:04 +0000

I appreciate learning from your experience.

Your story points to the paucity of affordable software that generates high-quality academic graphs. I have heard of high-end packages; reviews don’t sound promising – and very small teaching colleges such as the one where I work are unlikely to purchase it anyway.

Good graphing software would have a much smaller audience than word processing — but I wish someone in the OpenSource world would develop a passion for high quality graphics software.

By: tina

tina — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:46:38 +0000

Very, very cool.