Re: st: Re: St: stataweave

[David Airey <david.airey@Vanderbilt.Edu>]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 11:26 AM, Neil Shephard wrote:

> It is indeed a worthy goal, but I think its not entierly down to those
> who write software to simplify the process.

No argument from me.

It is interesting StatWeave is trying to make this kind of process  
available to OpenOffice formats, and I thought it worth pointing out.  
Rising must think something similar or he would not present talks at  
user group meetings on this topic. I was surprised to note that Sweave  
was apparently limiting Paul Murrell's efforts on book production  
efforts <http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/ItDT/> leading him to  
conclude that other open source XML tools were favorable to Sweave.  
Reproducible research is a well articulated set of principles, but the  
implementation is moving. Knuth started it all, later Sweave came  
along, and later SASWeave, and now a cross-platform StatWeave, but  
then Paul Murrell says XML is the future (which seems very mixable  
with Open Office). I do input Stata tables and figures into LaTeX  
documents, but it is worth knowing what others are thinking or doing,  
especially for those who are willing to put in the time.



> The reluctance to take up such an approach is in part down to the
> users who aren't willing to put the effort into learning something
> new, but instead are happy to plod along copying and pasting with the
> software they were taught at school/picked up what was available.
> Certainly my current line manager encourages this approach in others
> (I ignore it and write up my work as self-contained reports in LaTeX,
> providing separate tables (as *.csv) and figures (as stand-alone
> graphics) for anything that is required in other people's work).
>
> After all there becomes a trade-off point where the amount of effort
> going into making things "accessible and easy" isn't much when you are
> trying to do so for something thats relatively simple.  However,
> applying the same principle to a more complex process such as
> "Sweaving" results in diminishing returns for those who are tasked
> with doing the simplification.  That is to say they could spend a
> long, long time trying to make something which requires the end user
> to learn a little bit, when realistically the end user should learn
> how to do that, and the people tasked with simplifying things could be
> working more productively elsewhere (e.g. longtables's).
>
>
> Neil

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