Thanks to Kit Baum an update of the smclpres package is now available from SSC. To install it type in Stata ssc install smclpres, replace
The purpose of the smclpres package is to help make a .smcl presentation. Some talks are primarily on how to do things in Stata, like a lecture on graphs in Stata or a talk at a Stata Users' Group meeting. In those cases, a .smcl presentation can be useful. A .smcl presentation is a series of linked .smcl files that open in the viewer inside Stata (like help files). The strength of a .smcl presentation is that it can contain links that execute examples, open help files, open do-files, etc.
A .smcl presentation is all about illustrating how to do something in Stata, so preparing for such a talk typically starts with preparing a set of examples in a do-file. By adding specific comments to that do-file, for example, to indicate when a slide starts and when it ends, what the title of the slide is, etc., the smclpres command can turn that do-file into a .smcl presentation. Moreover, the pres2html command can turn that .smcl presentation into an HTML handout so that participants can easily access the content after the presentation.
In this update I almost completely rewrote the package in Mata. The reason for that was that the user can specify a huge amount of options governing the look of the presentation inside the source .do file. This large number of options made it unpractical to break up the main program into separate sub-routines inside Stata. As a consequence this program became too large to be easily maintained. In Mata one can use a struct as a "box" to store all those options, and just pass that "box" from one sub-routine to the next. For the user the change is minor, except for a number of small improvement and the fact that it now requires Stata 14. I have also added another example at http://maartenbuis.nl/software/smclpres.html .
The purpose of the smclpres package is to help make a .smcl presentation. Some talks are primarily on how to do things in Stata, like a lecture on graphs in Stata or a talk at a Stata Users' Group meeting. In those cases, a .smcl presentation can be useful. A .smcl presentation is a series of linked .smcl files that open in the viewer inside Stata (like help files). The strength of a .smcl presentation is that it can contain links that execute examples, open help files, open do-files, etc.
A .smcl presentation is all about illustrating how to do something in Stata, so preparing for such a talk typically starts with preparing a set of examples in a do-file. By adding specific comments to that do-file, for example, to indicate when a slide starts and when it ends, what the title of the slide is, etc., the smclpres command can turn that do-file into a .smcl presentation. Moreover, the pres2html command can turn that .smcl presentation into an HTML handout so that participants can easily access the content after the presentation.
In this update I almost completely rewrote the package in Mata. The reason for that was that the user can specify a huge amount of options governing the look of the presentation inside the source .do file. This large number of options made it unpractical to break up the main program into separate sub-routines inside Stata. As a consequence this program became too large to be easily maintained. In Mata one can use a struct as a "box" to store all those options, and just pass that "box" from one sub-routine to the next. For the user the change is minor, except for a number of small improvement and the fact that it now requires Stata 14. I have also added another example at http://maartenbuis.nl/software/smclpres.html .
