Stata 15 compatibility problem

[Ujjwal]

Dear forum,

Recently our university HPCs have upgraded to Stata15 while the general PCs have remained with Stata14. I have created few graphs in HPC (as my dataset is very large) in the batch mode connected through MobaXterm terminals. When I tried to open these gph files in Stata14, it gives an error message, "file .......is a new format that this version of Stata does not know how to read". I would imagine I should have saved the files in the old version, but unfortunately the saveold command is not working here.

Any suggestion is highly appreciated.

Ujjwal Kumar Das
PhD Student, Economics
University of Leeds
United Kingdom, LS2 9JT

[Nick Cox]

saveold is about saving datasets and is nothing whatsoever to do with saving graphs.

I don't think there is a Stata solution to this. Stata 14 doesn't understand Stata 15 graph formats.

There is plenty of scope to save the graphs to some other graphic format so that you can look at the graphs otherwise.

[Ujjwal]

Dear Nick, Thanks for your answer. I have tried other options but the problem persists. When I used
. graph export ".png"
translator Graph2png not found
r(111);
This seems to be a problem of Linux platform.
Then I used
. graph save Graph ".png"
(file .png saved)
. graph save Graph ".tif"
(file .tif saved)
This time the created files are simply blank. Any suggestions please.

[Nick Cox]

I can't tell you anything about your network or set-up but

1. It's documented that "png and tif are available for all versions of Stata except Stata(console)"

2. I would certainly recommend giving a full informative name such as "histogram.png" and never just a bare extension.

[William Lisowski]

Like Nick, I'm largely in the dark on this, but

1) I think it is graph export you need; help graph save does not document using it to change the format of the files.

2) Please see the Technical Note in the documentation for the graph export command found in the Stata Graphics Reference Manual PDF for Stata 15. Try adding the name() option to the graph export command, and try using the EPS format since there are circumstances under which png and tiff are not usable.

3) If you are creating your graphs using the graph commands directly, is it possible to create a reduced copy of your dataset containing just what is needed to produce the graph, and then move the reduced dataset to a PC running Stata 14 and create your graph there?

4) You could bring this issue to the attention of the university group(s) responsible for supporting the HPC and the PCs. In general, it is possible to have two versions of Stata installed simultaneously on the same system, so perhaps the HPC should continue to make Stata 14 available for compatibility with the PCs until such time as everything ha Stata 15 available. You might raise this issue through your department - talk to your advisor.

[Nick Cox]

I didn't notice (thanks William!) you were using graph save for a task for which the documented command is graph export

In your defence it should be noted that it's not 100% clear in the documentation that the most this command does is save in Stata's own .gph format; specifying another extension changes only the name.

For example -- trust me that I had a graph up when I did this -- I carried out this experiment

. graph save whatever
(file whatever.gph saved)

. graph save whatever.png
(file whatever.png saved)

. dir whatever.*
   3.1k   9/18/17 15:32  whatever.gph      
   3.1k   9/18/17 15:32  whatever.png

It is the same file, as can verified by typing it or looking in a text editor.

[Ujjwal]

Thanks Nick and William. I have checked further documentation and also spoken to the HPC technical team at my Uni. This is partly a problem of Stata UNIX platform which does not support graph export png or tif but support eps format. Also I need Stata 15 on my pc (we currently have Stata 14.1) to open gph files created by Stata 15 on HPC. However, I have solved my problem by creating the graph at HPC using Stata 14.