Let’s be clear, I really like Stata graphics!  There are people out there that complain about Stata graphics not looking flashy enough, but this is a really good thing – you have to know enough about the Stata graphics suite to make a graph look as bad as many new-excel-user graphs.  “Let’s add drop shadow, 3D, hovering label boxes, gradients, and lots of pictures” is a good idea when you’re the van Gogh of graphics, but most of these graphs end up resembling more of a Picasso leaving the audience asking whether that’s a y-label, or a text box, or maybe even an eye…

You may have noticed that there’s been a significant gap in these posts over the last few months and it’s been completely intentional.  My talented friend, Belen, and I have been studying Stata graphics enough to be labeled as completely crazy, but at least it has resulted in a marvelous presentation for the Stata User Group meeting. This process involves a lot of JavaScript and Stata integration to produce Tableau-like interactive graphs using the same familiar syntax that all Stata users know and love.  However, that’s not what we’re talking about in this post, no, get ready because today we are switching to graphic design with help from Adobe’s Creative Cloud!

Look, all math and no art makes for some REALLY boring posts – and we strive to make sure no post is too boring.  So we’ll spice things up by combining fitness, art, and math into one!  Before we go any further, if you’d like to follow along you might need to get yourself a copy of Adobe Illustrator CC which comes with a free 30-day trial.  Adobe Illustrator is a lot like the more commonly known Photoshop, but it specializes in making some really cool vector graphics.  You know, logos, drafts, general art.  Did you know that all Adobe products can be scripted using AppleScript, VBScript, and JavaScript?  Today, we’ll take advantage of very simple JavaScript statements in order to beautify our data.
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Our example data for this post comes from the aforementioned Fitbit API.  Belen and I both ran two half-marathons this year: the San Diego Half, the La Jolla Half, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half.  Yes, there’s three halves here, that’s because we ran two separately and one together!  While I’m very proud of our accomplishments, there’s a goldmine of data from our Fitbits just waiting to be visualized.  Each Fitbit activity contains time, distance, location, heart-rate data and more.  First things first, because the races started at different dates and different times, we should standardize our time variable (clock) to be time since the first gun start.

gen time = clock - clock[_n-1] 
replace time = sum(time)
duplicates drop time, force

​We do this for both datasets, we’ll call them WM and BC.  We’ll also preface all variables with the prefix WM or BC before we merge the data.  This can easily be accomplished by the command:

ren * WM*
ren WMtime time

Now we can merge the WM set on the BC set and standardize.

collapse (max) WM* BC* time, by(Time)
line WMelevation BCelevation Time

Look at that, a perfect 2D representation of our halves on the same axis.  The x-axis measures distance and time to completion whereas the y-axis shows the elevation at that time.  A steeper slope shows a very quick climb.  This is my one issue with this type of graph, it doesn’t show just how grueling the La Jolla Half once you enter Torrey Pines National Park, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
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Now, if you know about Adobe products but haven’t used any scripting yet, you’re in for a treat!  With Adobe CC you can easily download the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit IDE from the Creative Cloud, and this will allow us to do all of our scripting.  Unfortunately, many of you might know of easier ways to do what we’re going to accomplish in the next step so I have to mention this is merely for informative purposes that serves to remove the roadblock of knowing how to integrate Stata with Adobe products.  Back to the tutorial, let’s take this path for instance:

​It has four anchor points at some set of coordinates in our drawing space.  The coordinates usually take the form (x,y) so we can think of our path as an array of four coordinates.  Let’s look how we might start creating this path in JavaScript:

var doc = app.activeDocument;     
var stataPath = new Array(4);

Here, we set up our document as a variable as well as the path we’re going to create.  Notice, the path is going to be an array with four elements.  We start coding the elements as such (remember JavaScript lists initialize at 0):

stataPath[0] = new Array(78 , 317);
stataPath [1] = new Array(258 , 133);
stataPath [2] = new Array(537, 330);
stataPath [3] = new Array(828 , 154);

​Finally, we just have to add the following lines to have it actually draw our shape!

app.defaultStroked = true; 
newPath = app.activeDocument.pathItems.add(); 
newPath.setEntirePath(stataPath);

​And that’s essentially it!  I usually have Stata write the data I need to these arrays and enjoy how easy it is to create artful representations of our otherwise technical graphs.  One quick note, you should probably transform your data so that it fits in the dimensions of your Illustrator file (or you can scale it later).  Writing our script is extremely simple with the use of –filefilter – and loops.

tempfile f1
file open myfile using `f1', write replace
forvalues i = 1/`=_N' {
        file write myfile " stataPath [`=`i'-1'] = new Array( `=Time[`i']' , `=`init'[`i']');" _n 
}
file close myfile
view `f1'

​Once you run your script, the math stuff is over and it is time to make art!  Happy drawing.  In an unrelated note, the second reason for the lack of posts is because Belen has recently moved from San Diego and I wanted to take a moment to thank and acknowledge her for her contributions to wmatsuoka.com.  She’s been my unofficial editor and a great soundboard for what ideas are too stupid to make the cut for the Stata blog.  While it is always sad to see someone go, I wish her all the best in her new endeavors.  Good luck, Belen!  And here’s the final result of our blog: be forewarned that I am not claiming to be an artist.

​I recently celebrated my Birthday, which is an occasion where I can’t help but reminisce about the past or stop over-thinking about the future.  This also (closely) marks my two-year work anniversary, which precedes my two years of experience at the Energy Commission, two years of Graduate School, and that one year at UC Davis where I first learned about this great software called STATA.  Little did I know back then that it was a very big deal to spell Stata correctly.

In looking back at my experience at work, it’s easy to forget what I have done, and even easier to forget what I do on a day-to-day basis.  In order to help jog my memory, I wrote a crawler that scrapes all of our directories and all my personal files for any do-files I have written in these past two years.  I image the Twelve Days of Christmas tune when going over this list… but I really shouldn’t.

8 million characters typed
2 million words a-written
200,000 lines of codes
1,700 do-files
1,250 SQL statements
830 graphs
230 times invoking Mata
100 programs
All influenced by 3 coworkers that greatly shaped my code.

To create these numbers, I made good use of dir(), along with the fileread and filewrite functions. For a more detailed list of what I like to start my lines with, check out the attachment below!