Re: st: texdoc

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On May 17, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Michael Norman Mitchell wrote:
> Thanks for posting this to bring this to our (and my) attention. I  
> always believe very strongly in using this kind of "weaving"  
> approach and find it very efficient. Are you (or is anyone on the  
> Statalist) aware of a tool similar to this that weaves comments,  
> commands, output, and graphs into a Word document? At my work, we  
> are in constant need of creating such integrated outputs and the  
> standard format is a Word document.


I'm afraid your options here are going to be a lot more restricted if  
your target format is Word, since the people who have worked on this  
problem have tended to prefer LaTeX-based approaches or similar.  The  
one MS Office-based product I'm aware of for doing reproducible  
research is inference, from Blue Reference (http://inference.us/).   
Unfortunately, I don't believe they currently support Stata (I could  
be wrong here, since I haven't looked at this in a while).  I don't  
use Word myself, so there may be other MS Office-based options of  
which I am unaware.  One could certainly write something that would  
work with Office (as inference demonstrates), however you'd have to  
use VSTO and you'd be stuck with MS's upgrade cycles.

Another alternative is to use one of the other tools for reproducible  
research (e.g., StatWeave) and then translate the final product into  
Word.  This is the strategy I tend to favor when I have to deliver a  
final product in Word format, and there are several options here  
(though none of them is perfect).  For example, you can translate from  
LaTeX to RTF using latex2rtf, and then open the RTF file in Word (this  
is what I normally use).  Another option is to use TeX4ht to translate  
from LaTeX into Open Office, and then use Open Office to save the  
file(s) in Word format.  There may be better tool-chains for doing  
this out there -- I just don't do it often enough to go looking.

Ideally, you'd get people to covert to PDF as the target format (after  
all, you can work with PDFs on all platforms), and then you'd be in  
better shape.


-- Phil

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