Improving the output capabilities of Stata with Open Document Format xml Adam Jacobs Dianthus Medical Limited

Stata’s 3-fold capabilities  Statistics  Graphics  Data management

Statistics

Graphics

Data management

But there is a 4 th...

Text output  A recent clinical study: –92 pages of raw data listings –124 pages of descriptive data tabulations –3 pages of statistical analysis  All from a study in 12 healthy volunteers

Stata’s text output

Problems with Stata’s text output  No pagination  No formatting (or limited formatting with smcl)  Variable labels not always shown  No Unicode support  No tables of contents  etc etc

Some examples...

So how did I do it?

Open Document Format  An open standard, approved by ISO  XML based  For a variety of office-type documents  Used by the popular open-source office suite OpenOffice.org  Here, we are just interested in word-processing documents

.odt files  A.odt file is the native file format of OpenOffice.org Writer  A zip file  Contains various files, the most important of which is content.xml  content.xml is simply a plain-text file  Stata is good at writing plain-text files!

The Stata code  Creates the content.xml file by writing data with appropriate xml tags  Added to other files, zipped to.odt file .odt file can be opened directly with Writer

Some examples...

Basics of XML Adam Jacobs Flavia White

XML code for start of table

XML code for table cells Mileage (mpg) N 52

Was this a lot of work?  123 kB of code  21 ado files  45 Mata functions  And not finished yet!

Any questions?