Getting bold and italics simultaneously via {bf: and {it:

[Konrad Zdeb]

Colleagues,

I was wondering whether is possible to get bold and italicised font in the graph tile. Presently, I'm using code:

title("{it:{bf:Outside} this and that }"

which produces:
Outside this and that
whereas my ambition is to get
Outside this and that.

[Nick Cox]

As your experiment shows, italic and bold can't be combined using SMCL.

[Konrad Zdeb]

It's a shame, I was hoping that maybe there is a way to do this. Presumably, I could attempt to change the font face to a font type that looks like italic and bold.

[daniel klein]

With black font on white screen (i.e. the standard since Stata release 11 and in the viewer) you can trick SMCL and use {hi:} (or {opt } instead of {bf:}.

Save the following as foo.sthlp where Stata can find it

{smcl}
{sf:bar}
{bf:{it:bar}}
{it:{bf:bar}}
{it:{hi:bar}}
{it:{opt bar}}

and type h foo

Best
Daniel

[Konrad Zdeb]

Daniel,

Thanks very much for this. It works like a charm:

Out of curiosity, could you explain how this works?

[daniel klein]

Sorry, I have no further insights into SMCL, I just wrote and read lots of help files. It is mostly try and error, really.

Some parts of SMCL remain a mystery to me. For example, I cannot find a documentation of the order of evaluation. Writing

{it:{help foo}}

will display foo as a link to the help file called foo.sthlp while

{help {it:foo}}

displays (in blue) foo}. There are lots of other examples I cannot explain, but playing around a bit, I usually get close to what I want.

Best
Daniel

[Nick Cox]

Daniel: Good tricks.

[Joe Canner]

My guess is that {sf}, {bf}, and {it} are mutually exclusive and that the SMCL parser just moves left to right without trying to evaluate nesting. Accordingly, when it sees something like {bf:{it:bar}} the {it} overrides the {bf}. For whatever reason, {hi} and {opt} are not considered mutually exclusive with {it} and are thus additive.

Regarding Daniel's example using {help}, perhaps the SMCL help may clarify:

Pretend that {xyz} is a SMCL directive, although it is not. {xyz} might have any of
the following syntaxes:

Syntax 1: {xyz}
Syntax 2: {xyz:text}
Syntax 3: {xyz args}
Syntax 4: {xyz args:text}

Syntax 1 means "do whatever it is that {xyz} does". Syntax 2 means "do whatever it is
that {xyz} does, do it on the text text, and then stop doing it". Syntax 3 means "do
whatever it is that {xyz} does, as modified by args". Finally, syntax 4 means "do
whatever it is that {xyz} does, as modified by args, do it on the text text, and then
stop doing it".

Not every SMCL directive has all four syntaxes, and which syntaxes are allowed is made
clear in the descriptions below.

In syntaxes 3 [sic--should be 2] and 4, text may contain other SMCL directives. However, be aware of one
important limitation: not only must the braces match, but they must match on the same
physical (input) line.

Note that {help {it:foo}} violates the last rule, in that {help} is a syntax 3 directive and as such args cannot contain a SMCL directive. On the other hand, {it} is a syntax 2 directive and {it:{help foo}} is perfectly legal as per the last rule.

[summer jia]

Colleagues,
I want the variables in my table to be the name of their label, in italics. How can I modify the command：
esttab est1 using H.rtf, replace indicate(`r(indicate_fe)') star(* 0.1 ** 0.05 *** 0.01) b(%6.3f) t(2) ar2(3) nocons nogap title(Table) label