Tables of Statistics

Ian Watson's tabout can produce beautiful frequency tables and tables of summary statistics, with output in LaTeX or HTML, and as noted in Chapter 9 of the User's Guide for version 3, it can also produce dynamic documents.

Here we show how you can combine the power of tabout with the simplicity of markstat to produce dynamic documents, using an abbreviated version of the example on page 72 and table 34 of the User's Guide.

Note that we use tabout to generate table34.html and then simply .include table34.html in the document. We omit the options topf, topstr, botf and botstr, using simple Markdown with inline code instead. Here is the script

```s/
	quietly sysuse auto, clear
	quietly sum weight
	local meanwt = r(mean)
	quietly sum length
	local meanlen = r(mean)
	local obs = r(N)
	quietly tabout rep78 foreign using table34.html, replace ///
		style(htm) font(italic) c(mean weight) f(0c) sum ///
		twidth(9) h1(Car type (mean weight in lbs.)) h3(nil) ///
		title(Table 34: Short report example) fn(auto.dta)
```

The title of my short report
----------------------------

This is an excerpt of the report to focus on the dynamic parts.
And now we have an important result: __`s %3.2f `meanwt'`__ is
the average weight of all vehicles. And a second important 
result: __`s %3.2f `meanlen'`__ is the average length.

And now we have the first table.

<center>

.include table34.html

</center>

<style>table {display:table; width:auto;}</style>

And this is how the script is rendered by the command markstat using tabout.

Note. tabout generates the table title and footer as separate paragraphs rather than a caption and tfoot. As a result they are not centered when the table is centered. To keep everything together I wrapped the table in center tags. I also added a CSS rule at the end to make sure the table width was automatic.

To obtain LaTeX output you just need to change the output to using table34.tex, the style to style(tex), and then use \input{table34.tex} instead of .include.

In order to convert the generated LaTeX to PDF, however, we need to add four packages used by tabout which are not included in the Pandoc template. Fortunately this is easy to do with "header includes". This example uses only the first three packages, but I include all four for completeness. At the start of the script simply insert this YAML block:

---
header-includes:
  - \usepackage{multicol}
  - \usepackage{tabularx}
  - \usepackage{booktabs}
  - \usepackage{lscape}
---

The revised script is available here and the resulting pdf file is here.

The same approach can be used with other Stata commands that generate HTML or LaTeX output.