Stata legend: make it larger and allow for more colors

[Jacques La Fontaine]

Hello everyone, I am trying to make a twoway line plot with many (more than 20) overlaid lines. I have two problems:
1) At the moment the legend box is nearly a square, so it takes a lot of vertical space in the graph. How can I make it larger (more of a rectangular), so that it better exploits the space?
2) Is there a way to make stata legend use more colors, so that two different lines are not colored in the same way?

Thank you everyone in advance

[Andrew Musau]

20+ items in the legend and 20+ lines in one plot sounds like a recipe for disaster. Personally, I do not think that different colors will help much. Nonetheless, look at the -rows()- and -cols()- suboptions of -legend()-. For colors, changing scheme may help or you may need to explicitly specify the colors.

help legend_options

[Eric de Souza]

20+ items in the legend and 20+ lines in one plot sounds like a recipe for disaster.

help legend_options

Sometimes unavoidable even though one cannot distinguish between all the lines, such as here:
http://www.eurocrisismonitor.com/

[Jacques La Fontaine]

Sometimes unavoidable even though one cannot distinguish between all the lines, such as here:
http://www.eurocrisismonitor.com/

Yes, that's exactly what I'd like my plot to look like. I managed to deal with the legend size, but still cannot find how to include more colors than the default.

[Nick Cox]

We can't see what command you are using: you show precisely no syntax.

But in one case of line varlist time if you want say 24 colours then you need to specify what you want with a lcolor() option specifying those colours.

[Jacques La Fontaine]

We can't see what command you are using: you show precisely no syntax.

But in one case of line varlist time if you want say 24 colours then you need to specify what you want with a lcolor() option specifying those colours.

Thank you, I am doing a simple

twoway line varlist year, options

So I guess your solution work, I just wanted to know if there wasn't a more automated way of doing this

[Nick Cox]

Well, you could write a program to automate colour choice for an arbitrary number of colours. I don't know that anyone has done that. But users may have written graph schemes that allow that. I haven't tried to monitor such schemes which are often announced outside Statalist.

My own stance is that the best legend is none at all, but in various places I have tried to indicate alternatives to the awkward mix of multi-coloured spaghetti and bloated legend.

https://www.stata-journal.com/articl...article=gr0080

https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...e-on-ssc/page2

The challenge to you is to post your data so that people like me who have other ideas can have their bluff called.