Literate Data Analysis with Stata and Markdown

Abstract

In this article, I introduce markstat, a command for combining Stata code and output with comments and annotations written in Markdown into a beautiful webpage or PDF file, thus encouraging literate programming and reproducible research. The command tangles the input separating Stata and Markdown code, runs the Stata code, relies on Pandoc to process the Markdown code, and then weaves the outputs into a single file. HTML documents may include inline and display math using MathJax. Generating PDF output requires access to LATEX and a style file from Stata but works with the same input file.