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I use stata to get an eps graph, then use pdfLaTeX to get a pdf file.


When I zoom in the graph, we can see an ugly diamond.enter image description here How to solve it?

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closed as off topic by yo', egreg, Torbjørn T., Qrrbrbirlbel, lockstep Nov 5 '12 at 17:09


How does the diamond look like in the eps file? –  Marco Nov 5 '12 at 10:34
It is the same as the above figure. I insert the eps file into word, then use the pdf-maker to generate pdf file, thus the figure looks good. –  Pig Cry Nov 5 '12 at 11:20
What do you expect pdftex to do? It does not change your figure. This is expected behaviour. If you want a “proper” diamond, correct it with the application you used to generate the file. If you just want to convert EPS to PDF I would suggest to use ghostscript. The processing is faster and it's easier to use, especially if you use one of the wrappers like ps2pdf. –  Marco Nov 5 '12 at 12:01

1 Answer 1

This is more a question about Stata than it is about LaTeX. You use Stata to generate the graph and pdfLaTeX does not change it. If you open the graph in a viewer that is capable of displaying EPS files (e.g. Ghostview) you will find that the missing edges are already in the EPS.

In Stata there is not much you can do about it, except for explicitly choosing a different marker symbol with the msymbol option, e.g.

sysuse auto
scatter mpg weight if foreign, msymbol(O)
graph export filename, as(eps) preview(off) replace

See help symbolstyle and help scatter##marker_options in Stata for more information about marker symbols.


From what I saw, the triangle, square and diamond marker symbols all have a missing edge as do bars/boxes on bar charts, box plots, histograms.

If you are not familiar with Ghostview: Ghostview is a command-line only programme, but you can use GSView for instance as a GUI on Windows. Some programs like SumatraPDF can also display EPS files, but they also use Ghostview as a backend AFAIK.

It is sometimes helpful to also post on which platform (Windows, I presume) and with which software versions (Stata 11, 12?, Word, Acrobat/PDFMaker) and tex distributions (MiKTeX 2.9?) you are working. In this case it does not make much of a difference, I guess, except that Stata 12 on Windows is now capable of exporting PDF directly (on Mac you could do that at least with v11 already and on Linux I don't know). When exporting to PDF with Stata 12 on Windows, the diamonds are missing an edge as well, but strangely the squares don't (while they do when exporting to EPS - at least that's what I saw when testing it ad hoc).

It could be worthwhile to post this as a bug to Stata Corp. by the way.

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I use Stata 12.1 on Windows, yes, maybe it's a bug. Anyway, thank you for your following with interest. –  Pig Cry Nov 18 '12 at 9:23
