Controlling The Appearance of Your Graphs

About Style Templates

An ODS style is a collection of named style elements that provides specific visual attributes for your graphical and tabular SAS output. Each style element is a named collection of style attributes such as background color, text color, marker symbol, line style, font face, font size, as well as many others. Each graphical element of a plot, such as a marker, a bar, a line or a title, derives its visual attributes from a specific style element from the current style.

Note: The style that a destination uses is applied to tabular output as well as graphical output. [cautionend]

ODS Destinations and Default Styles

Every ODS output destination, except the Document and Output destinations, has a default style associated with it. These styles are tailored for each destination, therefore your output might look different depending on which destination you use. If your program does not specify a style, SAS uses the styles listed in Default Style Templates.

Default Style Templates
ODS Destination	Default Style Name
DOCUMENT	Not applicable
LISTING	Listing
OUTPUT	Not applicable
HTML	Default (Styles.Default)
LATEX	Default (Styles.Default)
PRINTER	Printer
RTF	Rtf
Measured RTF	Rtf

The default style for each destination is set in the SAS registry. Changing the style specified in the SAS registry can be a convenient way to apply a company's style to all output sent to all destinations. See Changing the Default Style in the SAS Registry.

Getting Started With SAS/GRAPH shows examples of graphs using several styles, including the default styles for the most commonly used destinations. Examples of Output Using Different Styles shows examples of graphs and tables using the Printer, Rtf, Analysis, and Journal styles.

Recommended Styles

SAS provides a set of styles that have been designed by GUI experts to address the needs of different situations. Recommended Style Templates describes a subset of the styles provided by SAS that are particularly well-suited to displaying graphics.

Recommended Style Templates
Desired Output	Recommended Styles	Comments
Full Color	Default (Styles.Default)	Gray background, optimized for HTML output
	Analysis	Yellow background
	Statistical	White background, colored fills
	Listing	White background, optimized for color format on white paper
	Printer	White background; serif fonts; optimized for PS and PDF output
	Rtf	Similar to Printer; optimized for RTF output
Black and White	onochromePrinter	Black and white output; patterned fills; optimized for PCL output
	Journal2	Interior filled areas have no color
Gray Scale	Journal	Interior filled areas are gray scale

Note: Certain ODS styles map textures onto graph elements. For the Java devices, these textures can be applied to two-dimensional rectangles only. Therefore, styles with textures cannot be applied to three-dimensional bar and pie charts in Java graphs. [cautionend]

Examples of Output Using Different Styles

Each of the following sets of output was created using a different style. Additional examples of output in Getting Started With SAS/GRAPH.

Output Using the Printer Style

[Output Using the Printer Style]

Output Using The RTF Style

[Output Using The RTF Style]

Output Using The Analysis Style

[Output Using The Analysis Style]

Output Using The Journal Style

[Output Using The Journal Style]

Note: The table in Output Using The Journal Style was sent to the PDF destination. [cautionend]

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