All official Stata help files for
several years have made use of SMCL.
Also, almost all user-written help files
now are written using SMCL.
If you are seeing .hlp files that are
not making use of SMCL they are almost
certainly some years old.
Notepad is a minimal text editor available
under Windows (and thereby unavailable
to those Stata users on Macintosh or Unix/
Linux). It has never been StataCorp policy
to tie any of their products to proprietary
software, whether platform-specific or not.
More importantly, the whole point of SMCL
is to provide attractive and useful
formatting of files, including clickable
links. That is, SMCL is designed to
benefit users in their use of help
(and other) files within Stata.
Now you can produce a version of the help
files in Windows by copying and pasting from
the Viewer window to a text editor or word
processor. If you do this
it is a good idea to make the Viewer
window relatively narrow so that the
lines become short. You can then edit
the copied material in NotePad or any decent text
editor, although naturally the issue
of copyright limits what you should
do with the files.
Alternatively, you can convert SMCL files to text
using -translate-. You will
lose much of the formatting, naturally.
Alternatively, you can convert the SMCL
to HTML using -log2html- from SSC,
which then allows editing of the
result in a program of your choice,
although the same copyright issues arise.
Nick
[email protected]
Branko Milanovic
> Why is it that when I download some of the files the .hlp files
> sometimes come in smcl format which is really useless (rather
> than as a
> neat text to be read in Notepad). What should I do? Can I convert smcl
> into text? (setting "set logtype text" does not help; i.e it
> helps only
> when you export your own stata stuff into a text file).
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