Re: st: dprobit and est2tex

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

On Apr 29, 2010, at 2:33 AM, John wrote:

> I don't know, Kit.  I seem to recall someone deprecating anything not
> ESTOUT or LATEX.  I don't know anybody in my department do it the way
> you do.  Please don't make it seem like anyone not seeing your way is
> stupid, absurd, or just plain nonsense.  Users are entitled to their
> opinions as you say.  If they don't always agree with you, that's just
> the way it is.

in response to my original posting 

> This is patently absurd. If you google 'texify', you find readily enough (http://docs.miktex.org/manual/texifying.html)
> that this command has nothing to do with Stata; it is part of the MikTeX package "that simplifies the creation of DVI (PDF) documents." It is the Windows equivalent of Unix pdflatex. I can't see how suggesting that a user run a utility program (which
> may or not be available, depending on the user's OS and LaTeX implementation) has anything to do with intellectual property 
> rights. 
> 
> There are often multiple solutions to any problem requiring user-written code to produce the desired results (such as
> converting estimation results to LaTeX, which is not something Stata does itself). Users are entitled to their opinions about
> which solution to adopt, and naturally suggest the solution that they find works best for them. Those asking questions on
> Statalist are seeking answers. I don't see that it is productive to deprecate one person's answer, assuming it solves the 
> problem posed,  because it is not the only possible way to skin that particular cat.

responding to Carlos:

> I googled your codes.
> 
> "!texify -p -c -b --run-viewer myfile.tex"
> 
> According to google, there are only two people associated with this.
> One is you, Martin. The other is the outreg2 help file. You are going
> to tell me he stole this from you?

I made quite clear in my response that there are many ways to skin a particular cat: for instance, to take what comes out
of Stata's estimation results  and put it into a format usable by LaTeX, Word, Excel, mySQL, etc. There is no unique solution. Those who have  invested in using one of those solutions naturally prefer it, and advise others to consider using it. Some of the reasons for such recommendations of user-written packages include ease of use, quality of documentation and examples, 
authors' responses to announced bugs, and the like. Naturally, as various packages' strengths and weaknesses are discussed,
some people will express a strong preference for package A over package B. As has been discussed in other postings
in the last 24 hours, that is a healthy discussion. IMHO stating that code has been 'stolen' (on the basis of comparing lines
of code) is not a healthy nor productive topic for discussion. John seems to confuse the issue of what recommendations
have been offered by many of us on this list to solve problems with a distasteful prior thread on whose code was 'stolen' from
whom. In the case of Carlos' comment, it relates to a line that was not even Stata code, but an operating system call to an external utility program!

On the latter point, if you examine the code for Baum-Schaffer-Stillman ivreg2, you will certainly find evidence of grand larceny.
Much of the code that parses the command line was lifted verbatim from StataCorp's ivreg.ado (sic). If it works, and was produced
by professionals, why reinvent the wheel? It is also accepted practice to take existing user written code for the 'foo' command,
add the features you feel are missing, and post it as 'foo2'. Common courtesy would lead the author to acknowledge that it is based on John Doe's 'foo.ado'.

So I readily acknowledge that some people love Word, some people love LaTeX. Neither group is likely to agree with the
other's preferences before the next millennium. Some people love estout, some love outreg2, some love outreg (or are likely to love the new, improved version to be announced at the BOS'10 Stata Conference), some love est2tex, some love tabout, and so on. Chacun a son gout. Nothing in this thread has contradicted that notion.

Kit Baum   |   Boston College Economics & DIW Berlin   |   http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
                              An Introduction to Stata Programming  |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
   An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata  |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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