Overlaying a line on a bar chart

[Belinda Foster]

Hello.

I would like to overlay a line on a bar chart (with multiple bars) which was created with graph bar. Is this possible?

[Roger Chu]

Hello Belinda,

Try the option -yline()-.

help added_line_options

Keep in mind, for -graph bar-, yline is the only added line option, since there is no numeric x-axis to put an xline onto. If you want to add vertical lines, I would suggest reformatting your data and using -twoway-.

[Belinda Foster]

Roger thanks but this is not what i want. I would like to add a line on the y-axis which fluctuates depending on each category on the x-axis.

[Nick Cox]

I think you need to move to twoway bar to do that. Give example data, and example code will likely follow.

[Belinda Foster]

Nick, basically I have a bar chart created with graph bar, in which there are a number of bars each indicating the counts of a bin. I would like to plot in the same graph the normal distribution for the entire range (from first to last bar). Is this possible with graph bar?

This has been done in MATLAB before, see here: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcent....mathworks.com

[Nick Cox]

This question keeps morphing...

graph bar and normal. Not that I know of. The whole conceit of graph bar is that it is for categories. Whether you think of the categories as being on a numerical scale is up to you and no concern of graph bar.

I have used MATLAB on occasion but not for some time, and I am too lazy to find a machine to run that code. But assuming that the word description is enough, the easy way to superimpose a histogram (rather than bar chart) with a normal distribution is to use histogram

sysuse auto, clear 
histogram mpg, normal