Formatting labels on graphs

[Adam Krolikowski]

Hi,

I have two questions about formatting labels on graphs, and I haven't been able to find answers to these questions either in the Stata help or online.

First, if one of my axes has values >0 and <1, I would like to have "0" as the first label, and - say - "0.01" as the second label, etc. But if I do not impose any formatting, I get "0" and ".01" (would wish to have "0.01" instead). If I impose %9.2f, I get "0.00" and "0.01" (would wish to have "0" as the first label instead). Is there anything I can do about this?

Second, the minus sign on my graphs looks very much like a hyphen, i.e. it's very short, much shorter than usual (I would expect it to be more like a dash). Is there anything I can do to make it less "hyphen-like" and more "dash-like"?

I am very sorry if either of these questions is too simple or obvious.

Best regards,

Adam

[Nick Cox]

Here's a silly graph but some technique. Set a format, but override it explicitly when you want something else.

 
sysuse auto

scatter foreign mpg, yla(0 "0" 0.1(0.1)0.9 1 "1", ang(h) format(%03.2f))

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Adam, is this the kind of axis labeling you want?

[Adam Krolikowski]

Nick, thank you very much -- this works perfectly for me!

Sergiy, yes, this would be fine about "0" and "0.01"; however, I also needed some idea to solve my problem with the width of the minus sign. Using the format from Nick's reply, I've managed to solve this already!

Thanks a lot to you both!

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Same technique Nick and I were using to format the zero point can be applied to any other label. Above is an image with minus signs of different lengths interleaved.

[Friedrich Huebler]

Adam, is this the kind of axis labeling you want?

Above is an image with minus signs of different lengths interleaved.

Sergiy, why so coy? Why won't you show your code? The graphs only demonstrate that something can be done in Stata but if you don't share how you did it the posts are less helpful than they could be otherwise.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

The challenge is really to understand the questions that are being posted.
The code is no secret, as I mentioned, it is the same technique Nick has shown already. For the minuses it is:

sysuse auto, clear

generate x=-weight/price/mpg
summarize x
twoway scatter price x, xlabel(-0.06 "`=char(151)'0.06" ///
                               -0.05 "`=char(045)'0.05" ///
                               -0.04 "`=char(151)'0.04" ///
                               -0.03 "`=char(045)'0.03" ///
                               -0.02 "`=char(151)'0.02" ///
                               -0.01 "`=char(045)'0.01" ///
                                0    "0", format(%03.2f))