Let’s render an XKCD comic using Stata!

I loved today’s XKCD comic so I decided to take some time while eating my sandwich to write a .do file script to render it in Stata. There aren’t great smooth line options without figuring out the exact function for each line in Stata, so I approximated the data points. One interesting problem was including quotes in the X axis label since quotation marks are used to define the label and line breaks for labels. The solution was wrapping the line with an opening tick (`, to the left of number 1 on your keyboard) and closing with an apostrophe. This is also a nice example of how to input data in a .do file.

End result:

Code follows.

clear all

input id proportion band1 band2 band3 band4 band5 band6 band7 band8 band9 band10
id proportion band1 band2 band3 band4 band5 band6 band7 band8 band9 band10
0 . 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
0.3 . 21 22 23.7 25.5 26.3 28 28.8 29.2 29.5 30
0.5 . 20.8 22.5 24.7 27 28 29 29.2 29.4 29.7 30
0.7 . 20.6 25 27.4 28.4 29 29.3 29.5 29.6 29.9 30
0.9 . 20.1 28 28.5 29 29.3 29.5 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
1 23 20.1 28.5 29 29.3 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
1.3 . 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
2 23.5 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
3 22.3 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
4 23.5 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
5 23 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
6 28 20.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 30
end

set scheme s1mono

graph twoway ///
(connected proportion id, lcolor(gs0) mcolor(gs0)) ///
(scatter band1 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band2 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band3 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band4 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band5 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band6 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band7 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band8 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band9 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
(scatter band10 id, conn(j) lstyle(solid) lcolor(gs12) mstyle(none)) ///
, ///
title(Y-Axis) ///
xlabel(none) /// 
xline(1(1)6, lpattern(solid) lcolor(gs12)) ///
ylabel(20 "0%" 25 "50%" 30 "100%", angle(0)) ///
aspect(1) ///
ytitle("") ///
legend(off) ///
xtitle(`"People have wised up to the "carefully"' ///
`"chosen Y-axis range" trick, so we misleading"' ///
"graph makers have had to get creative.")

graph export xkcd_2023.png, width(1000) replace