I like SMCL.
ben
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> I suspect that more people use the Viewer window for looking at help
> than use the Results window. Perhaps Roy meant that.
>
> If anyone's counting, I am not complaining about SMCL. In fact since
> this thread started I note precisely two user-programmers doing so with
> any energy, not that this is some kind of ongoing election.
>
> To me SMCL does a good job at what it was designed for. Anyone who
> judges SMCL as it were a lousy approximation to PDF is my view missing
> the point.
>
> A quite different point is that this thread is lacking some historical
> perspective. The novelty is the emphasis on the possibility of help
> files provided as .pdf.
>
> Roger Newson has provided the most crucial bit of information -- which I
> had forgotten -- namely that StataCorp have already promised to provide
> some help for users moving in that direction. That's a welcome reminder.
> It takes away some real worries about an anarchy of individually-set
> standards.
>
> But some users have been providing extra documentation in .pdf and .html
> for some years without making any fuss. The -gllamm- manual is a
> longstanding example. Roger's website contains several others. Ben
> Jann's site documenting -estout- is yet another's. I doubt that is an
> exhaustive list.
>
> And, in a very strong sense, the Stata Journal and its predecessor the
> Stata Technical Bulletin exist to provide users with a medium for
> documenting their work properly, together with graphs, equations, etc.,
> as appropriate, and have been doing so since 1991.
>
> Why go to enormous lengths, as some seem inclined to do, producing an
> all-singing, all-dancing documentation for your programs when the same
> effort would get you a submission and, subject to peer review, a
> publication to the Stata Journal?
>
> Nick
> [email protected]
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