Timothy McKenna wrote:
Why would downloading from the ideas archive directly result in files that are
possibly corrupt? Those of us stuck behind corporate firewalls typically do
not have any other option but to download updates and ado files directly. I
have never had any problems with the direct downloads, have I been just lucky?
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I believe that it has to do with the suffix .hlp for the ASCII Stata help
filename, which is shared by Windows Help files.
If you download it from the IDEAS archive to, say, a temporary directory and
double-click on it directly from a Windows Explorer pane, you'll get a "The
C:\Temp\ipshin.hlp is not a Windows Help file, or the file is corrupted."
message, because Windows cannot recognize the file type.
However, if you place it into the proper Stata directory along with the ado-
file, it seems to work properly from within Stata.
Note that the file size does seem to differ slightly between an SSC install and
a download from IDEAS, for example, ipshin.hlp is 3456 bytes by -ssc install-
and 3378 bytes by downloading (as a "helpfile") from within Windows XP SP2 from
IDEAS. This might have to do with Windows thinking that it's downloading a
binary file in the latter case. It doesn't seem to have any adverse
consequences.
Joseph Coveney
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