Re: st: combining tables

["Roger B. Newson" <r.newson@imperial.ac.uk>]

I haven't used TPL even via SAS, having weaned myself off SAS about a 
decade ago by writing a suite (or dialect) of Stata commands to do 
everything I used to do with SAS. However, this dialect now includes a 
language for the mass-production of tables in a Rich Text Format (RTF) 
document. (And linked graphs, too, in the same document.) The package to 
do this is -rtfutil-, which you can download from SSC, together with the 
-listtab- package and a suite of other packages. Users can also use 
these packages to produce tables in HTML, TeX and LaTeX, and probably 
will also to be able to use it with XML-based block-structured dialects 
yet to be invented.

My feedback so far is that (as Daniel says about TPL) this dialect is 
difficult for most people to learn in a hurry. However, a recent 
reference on using my packages to produce TeX and RTF documents is 
Newson (2012).

I hope this helps.

Best wishes

Roger

References

Newson RB. From resultssets to resultstables in Stata. The Stata Journal 
2012; 12(2): 191–213. Purchase from
http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=st0254

Roger B Newson BSc MSc DPhil
Lecturer in Medical Statistics
Respiratory Epidemiology and Public Health Group
National Heart and Lung Institute
Imperial College London
Royal Brompton Campus
Room 33, Emmanuel Kaye Building
1B Manresa Road
London SW3 6LR
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: +44 (0)20 7352 8121 ext 3381
Fax: +44 (0)20 7351 8322
Email: r.newson@imperial.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/nhli/r.newson/
Departmental Web page:
http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/about/divisions/nhli/respiration/popgenetics/reph/

Opinions expressed are those of the author, not of the institution.

On 30/10/2012 23:49, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Nick Cox wrote:
>
> > The short answer seems to me to be that most of the activity over the
> > last decade has come from users.
> >
> > I think many Stata users would agree that we need "Better tables", but
> > once you start to talk about details, disagreement about what that
> > means becomes more prominent.
>
> Surely the fact that SAS humbled itself to adopt the syntax and
> semantics of the Table Production Language is a strong indication that
> TPL is appropriate way to implement tables in a statistical package.
> Other packages are difficult and won't create the tables that are
> typically seen in publications. TPL can produce those tables. TPL may be
> difficult, but that only because the SAS documentation emphasizes fancy
> formatting issues to the near exclusion of explanatory material on the
> basic issue of what numbers are being calculated. If Bill Gould wrote 10
> pages of explanation, it would be easy for users to create what they
> need. To create publication ready photo-perfect pages would take a lot
> more explanation, of course.
>
> dan feenberg
> NBER
>
> > (I'm oddly reminded of Quine's quirky quip about the ontological
> > problem, for which see (e.g.)
> >
> > <http://sfcmadrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/quine-on-what-there-is.pdf>
> >
> > I want to admit that I don't understand anything much after the first
> > paragraph, but the first paragraph is what applies here.)
>
> It appears to be an argument against the legitimacy of the concept of
> zero. I think most Stata users would be hard to convince.
>
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