Title for categorical axis

[R Allan Reese]

Posting this because it's taken a few hours for the penny to drop, and maybe it will help someone or could be put in documentation. I made a box plot over(month) which looks fine except the "x" axis is labelled 1,2,3,...12 and doesn't say what the values are. Option xti() gives an error message "there isn't an x axis" and I didn't find a suggestion in help, pdf manuals or the Forum. Finally twigged that b1(Month) did what I wanted. Maybe I'm just losing my mind ...

[Nick Cox]

I agree with R Allan Reese that this should be documented (and isn't so far as I can see).

Allan is assuming use of graph box. If you're using graph hbox, it's a different title.

. sysuse auto, clear
(1978 automobile data)

. graph box mpg, over(rep78)

. graph box mpg, over(rep78) b1title(Repair record 1978)

. graph hbox mpg, over(rep78) l1title(Repair record 1978)

Further, community-contributed commands that produce box plots are likely to be using twoway, in which case xtitle() is always available.

[Clyde Schechter]

If you attach a value label to the month variable, -graph box y, over(month)- will use the value labels on the horizontal axis without any additional work required.

Added: Crossed with #2. And I now realize that my response is off-point. O.P. was interested in providing a title for the axis, not for getting the months themselves displayed as month names. Then again, maybe if the months were display as month names, the title would be redundant.

[Nick Cox]

In many people's past was a teacher, often in physics, who was scathing if you didn't label your axes properly.

That teacher was right, except that -- as in Clyde Schechter's #3 -- axis labels such as "January" or "2024" surely don't need an explicit axis title too.