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RE: st: re: TeX template for PDF help files


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: st: re: TeX template for PDF help files
Date   Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:23:05 -0000

Let's put the choices this way: 

1. Open your text editor (could be Stata's do-file editor) and prepare a
.smcl file directly. 

2. Use a translator:

2a. Someone needs to write a translator for your favoured preparation
environment. (Some interest in having that available, fewer volunteers,
no programs yet available.) 

2b. Open your favoured preparation environment. Prepare the help file. 

2c. Run the translator to convert the help file to .smcl. 

2d. If it's not perfect, you're going to need to edit the .smcl anyway. 

It seems to me that the strategy #2 resembles going from New York to
Boston via Chicago, quite unnecessarily. With this difference: as yet
there is no way to get from New York to Chicago. 

Nick 
[email protected] 

Airey, David C

Phil wrote:

> A markup language like reStructuredText (which I mentioned in a
previous post) has a learning curve that is less steep than that for
LaTeX (or so I would argue).

It seems like the list of starting points for writing help files is
growing. Everyone does not use the same tools for document creation,
obviously. Regardless of the merits reStructuredText (looks good, thanks
for point it out) I think SMCL is useful to end-users as a final common
output. So it seems the idea of translators to SMCL from various
favorite document creation tools (Word, ODF, LateX, ReStructuredText) is
most helpful.


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