Markstat to latex troubleshooting

[Jacopo Mazza]

Hi all, I am using and enjoying a lot, the markstat command written by German Rodriguez. I have successfully installed pandoc, whereis and downloaded the stata.sty file. Everything works fine when I try to compile an HTML or DOCX file, the issue starts when I try to generate a PDF using MixTeX (2.9 updated) which is my LaTeX installation.

When I run the "simpleScript.stmd" example from the markstat documentation page with the command:

markstat using simpleScript, pdf

the pdf does not compile, but a Tex file is created. I show here the preamble of the TeX document

\PassOptionsToPackage{unicode=true}{hyperref} % options for packages loaded elsewhere

\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}

%

\documentclass[
\usepackage{stata}
]{article}

\usepackage{lmodern}

\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}

\usepackage{ifxetex,ifluatex}

\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage{textcomp} % provides euro and other symbols

\else % if luatex or xelatex

\usepackage{unicode-math}

...

You will notice that for some reason that I cannot understand

\usepackage{stata}

is within the square brackets of the \documentclass. This is causing all the trouble. If I manually take it out of the brackets the PDF compiles just fine. So not a huge issue, but it is a bit annoying and in any case, I would like to understand what is causing the issue.

Any idea?

[German Rodriguez]

Hi Jacopo Mazza. Thanks for reporting this issue. Turns out this is due to a change introduced in Pandoc 2.7, which modified the LaTeX template in a way that broke markstat. Currently the code goes through the first few lines of the generated LaTeX looking for a line starting with \documentclass and inserts \usepackage{stata} immediately after that. Unfortunately, in the new template \documentclass spans at least two lines, and that causes markstat to insert the Stata style in the wrong place!

I am testing possible fixes that will work with Pandoc 2.7 as well as earlier versions, and will update the command in SSC as soon as possible. In the meantime, a quick fix is to have markstat look for {article} or {beamer} instead, changing the line that reads if(startsWith(line, "\documentclass")) { to if(ustrpos(line,"{article}") > 0 || ustrpos(line,"{beamer}") > 0) {, at least while I come up with something more robust.