Improving the output capabilities of Stata with Open Document Format xml

Stata's capabilities for statistical analysis, graphics, and data management are world-class, but it's ability to produce well presented textual output is considerably more limited. Some problems that are particularly annoying are a lack of appropriate page breaks or repetition of column headers in large tables, Unicode support, and many of the other features taken for granted in word processors, such as automatically generated tables of contents. But all is not lost. Open Document Format (ODF) is an open ISO standard for office-type documents, including word processing documents, and is the default file format of the popular open source office software suite OpenOffice.org. It is an xml-based format, which means that ODF files can be written in a text editor, or with software that can produce output in plain-text format. Happily, Stata is more than equal to the task of producing plain-text output. In this talk, I shall explain how I have used Stata to produce output in ODF xml files, thus making the appearance of output considerably more user-friendly than native Stata output.