help for scheme_plotplain(Version 1.3.0)

Title

Scheme description: plotplain & plotplainblind

Scheme description: blind and colorblind

The plotplain scheme family is:

schemename Foreground Background description

plotplain{…}
black white black on white
plotplainblind{…}
color white colorblind friendly colors on white

Syntax

For instance, you might type

. graph
...,
...
scheme(plotplain)

. set
scheme
plotplain
[,
permanently
]

See help scheme_option and help set_scheme.

Description

Schemes determine the overall look of a graph; see help schemes.

The scheme plotplain uses shades of gray and shapes of lines to distinguish plotted subgroups in a figure.

The scheme plotplainblind relies upon the same design as plotplain but introduces 7 new colors which should also be distinguishable for colorblind
people.

Remarks

The schemes plotplain and plotplainblind have no background tinting; y-axis labels are horizontal; gridlines are dots; gridlines are drawn for the x- and y-axis; gridlines are thin; axis line end at with last label marker and start with first label marker; x- and y-axis are in gray; markers are all small; lines are medium thin; fonts of labels are small; legends are not framed; legends appear on the right hand side of the figure; keylabels of legends are medium large; legends rely on rows first; plotregions are omitted; intensity of pie- and bar figures is reduced to 50; borderlines of histograms and bar are thin; marker symbols are reordered to assure that points in scatters are less often overlapping.

On top of that, the scheme plotplainblind introduces 7 new colors to stata. Furthermore, the scheme only uses these seven colors in case figures are drawn for more than two subgroups. In case the user only specifies that the figure should be plotted across two subgroups, one group will appear in black and the other group in gray. All colors are chosen in order to be distinguishable for colorblind people. Colorblindness is not a total loss of color vision. Colorblind people can recognize a wide ranges of colors. But certain ranges of colors are hard to distinguish (see Okabe & Ito below). After installing plotplainblind, the seven colors are also available in the default stata color palette. Thus, they may be used like any other color in stata. E.g.:

. line
x
y
,
lcolor(reddish)

The seven colors are:

ananas
sky
turquoise
reddish
vermillion
sea
orangebrown

More details on the schemes may be found in the working paper indicated below.

References

Bischof, D. 2015. Figure Schemes for Decent Stata Figures: plotplain & plottig. http://danbischof.wordpress.com/publications/

Okabe, M. & Kei Ito. Color Universal Design (CUD) - How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people. http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/

Author

Daniel Bischof, Department of Political Science,
University of Zurich, CH.

Also see

Online: help for schemes; scheme_option, set_scheme