SPMAP with Stata 15? Polygon-outlines disappear...

[Christoph Thewes]

Anyone else using SPMAP with Stata 15 (latest versions)? I noticed a problem with the outlines of polygons. They just disappear using Stata 15, no matter what size I choose in osize().

Can someone reproduce this?
Thanks!

[Andrew Lover]

Can you post a reproducible example?

[Christoph Thewes]

Looks like I have two problems:

1. I changed line-date (small rivers) to polygons with QGIS and merged this with lakes+big rivers (polygons) into one dataset. Worked fine with Stata 14 (stata14.pdf). Now with Stata 15 the small rivers converted from lines to polygons disappear (stata15.pdf). Both graphs created by the exact same code:

spmap turnout using "data/shp/utm32_de_coor", id(id) ///
clnumber(16) fcolor(Heat) clmethod(eqint) eirange(13 78) ocolor(Heat) osize(vvthin) ///
legend(off) name(turnout, replace) ///
polygon(data("data/shp/dlm250_coor2") by(linetype) ///
fcolor(blue*.5 blue*.7) ocolor(blue*.7 blue*.7) osize(thick thick))

2.The other problem is Stata 15 ignoring the osize-option inside of polygon(). If you run the spmap-example code below in 14 and 15 you can see the difference:

use "Italy-OutlineData.dta", clear
spmap using "Italy-OutlineCoordinates.dta", id(id) fc(sand) ///
polygon(data("Italy-Lakes.dta") fcolor(blue) ocolor(red) osize(vvthick))

data is attached.

I'm really confused on how those problems are connected...if needed, I can upload the data for problem 1.

Any idea?

[Chinh Nguyen (StataCorp)]

Please upload data for problem 1 too.

[Christoph Thewes]

ok, use this code:

use "s21", clear

spmap turnout using "utm32_de_coor", id(id) ///
  clnumber(16) clmethod(eqint) fcolor(Heat) ocolor(Heat) eirange(13 78) ///
  osize(vvthin) legend(off) ///
  polygon(data("dlm250_coor2") by(linetype) ///
  fcolor(blue*.5 blue*.7) ocolor(blue*.7 blue*.7) osize(thick thick))

with -this- data
(normal upload failed: "This is not a valid image file". ???)

[Chinh Nguyen (StataCorp)]

Both problems are due to a change in Stata 15 in how it strokes outlines. As a result of transparency color support in Stata 15, Stata by default strokes outlines of objects using what's know as an inside stroke rather than a center stroke. This has caused objects, such as polygons, to appear smaller which is what you're seeing. I believe this can be fixed by simply changing the default stroke for polygons in the scheme files which we'll release in an update.

[Christoph Thewes]

ok, that makes sense! Will use Stata 14 for now (and will not ask for ETA)...

Thanks!

[Jeff Pitblado (StataCorp)]

With Maurizio Pisati's permission, and thanks to Kit Baum for maintaining the SSC, we updated spmap to use center stroked outlines in Stata 15. This change was made using version control so that spmap continues to work in older versions of Stata.

To update spmap in Stata, type

adoupdate spmap

then follow the instructions.