Two problems in Graph Editor

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Possibly bugs in Graph Editor.

Environment:
Stata 18 compile number 180146/Windows 11

Update status
Last check for updates: 24 Jul 2024
StataNow update available: 16 Jul 2024 (what's new)
Current update level: 16 Jul 2024 (what's new)

Context:
See screenshot below

1. When pressing the button indicated with the red arrow, I believe I should get a color picker to pick the custom color. This is not happening. Clicking the button has no effect, except that in the output window I get a message "(note: named style -2081522952 -2081522952 -2081522952 not found in class color, default attributes used)".
PS: selecting a named color from a drop-down list works.

2. Trying to use the format doesn't produce any difference (whether typed-in manually or picked from the suggested formats). (Note that in my case the variable on the horizontal axis is already formatted as %tm, and this format is being disregarded during the chart construction).

Best, Sergiy Radyakin

[ericmelse]

Dear Sergiy,

I think you better mail about this issue to Technical Support: tech-support (at) stata.com

Best,
Eric

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Hello Eric,

Stata developers regularly monitor this board for bug reports. But I wanted to confirm that this is something reproducible on other systems and not a result of my confusion or misunderstanding.

Update:

1. option format() may be passed from command line, but has no effect whereas the option forcolor() does have an effect:

graph bar ...... , over(myvarname, label(angle(90) labcolor(black) format(%tm) labsize(small))) stack

I believe the option is parsed correctly: if I misspell it then Stata complains, so it definitely expects a format option in this place.

2. My current workaround is to use variable labels, and assign them manually to the values 750..774 in my code, which allowed to have full control over the label formatting, but is an extra step, which I believe is not necessary.

Thank you, Sergiy.