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RE: st: RE: outreg/estimates type commands for ttest


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: RE: outreg/estimates type commands for ttest
Date   Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:00:49 +0100

The help itself indicates [P] display. 

[R] display is just a token entry. 

The placement itself indicates two problems. 
Putting the entry in [P] arises because 
being on top of -display- is important for 
Stata programmers; but many users need 
to use -display- even if they never write 
Stata programs. Conversely, there is a middle-aged
spread problem as Stata matures: keeping each manual 
volume at reasonable size is a constant struggle.
The [R] volumes are already fat! 

Beyond that, StataCorp are thinking about you 
and their thought is that you would find [P] 
very useful. I get no royalties for sales 
or advertisements. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Nishant Dass
 
> Wow!  I admire your effort in responding to the query in
> such detail.  
> 
> Thanks for referring me to -help smcl-; I found "{space #}"
> which worked well for adding space between the two numeric
> columns.  (I see "{space #}" is also written into -dlist-.)
> 
> One last thing - could you please tell me where could I
> read more about subcommands like "_skip", "_column",
> "_char", etc. mentioned under -display-?

> --- Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > The variable names displayed at left are of unequal
> > length. 
> > 
> > In contrast I know that I would like the first column of
> > numeric 
> > results to be aligned vertically and to be a column in
> > the strict 
> > sense. Thus I specify "{col 22}", which is a SMCL
> > directive. 
> > See -help smcl-. 
> > 
> > SMCL is Stata's own mark-up language. The name is a
> > contraction of 
> > SMCL Makes Cooler Logs (the documentation is in error on
> > this point). 
> > 
> > There is an alternative which would be to specify that
> > the number of 
> > spaces skipped depends on the length of the variable
> > name, 
> > but choosing a particular column is much easier. 
> > 
> > Also, in this case 22 is empirically chosen, as none of
> > the variable names 
> > in the auto dataset is especially long. For other
> > datasets 
> > I would need to use a column greater than 22, or to
> > consider 
> > abbreviating the variable name. 
> > 
> > In contrast, for the spacing between two columns of
> > numeric results 
> > my use of formats implies that each column (field) is of
> > constant width, 
> > so I know that I can just give so many spaces. In this
> > case I do have 
> > a simple alternative, which is to specify 
> > columns for the start of each field using "{col #}", but
> > that 
> > would oblige me to do some arithmetic, which 
> > seems too much like hard work. 
> > 
> > So the laziness of the programmer is paramount here,
> > except that 
> > it works. 
> > 
> > -dlist- from SSC is a moderately simple worked example
> > showing 
> > various similar tricks, including also abbreviations,
> > trimmings 
> > of leading and trailing spaces, display of variable
> > labels 
> > and display of value labels. 

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