Put a Little Shade in your Graphs

Suppose you graph a time series and you want to highlight a certain range (for example, U.S. real GDP series and you want to color the area between 1929 to 1939 to indicate the years under the Great Depression):

line rgdp year

Well, a simple way to do that is to add another variable and use the twoway graph command "AREA." To start with, your new variable has to be a constant with value equal to the highest data point in your y-axis. So for example, in your graph of U.S. real GDP, the highest value given is 3,500 billions of constant 2005 $. So:

gen new=3500

Now, your new graph command should be:

twoway (area new year if year>=1929 & year<=1939) (line rgdp year)

You have to start with the AREA-type graph first because the first graph type will always be superimposed by the next graph type.

Special Characters in STATA Graphs

Thanks to helpful hints from my friend Mitch Abdon's excellent STATA blog site, if you want to use special characters in your STATA graphs (e.g. Greek letters), you can look at full options by typing:

help graph_text