Markdoc: Literate Programming in Stata

Abstract

Rigorous documentation of the analysis plan, procedure, and computer codes enhances the comprehensibility and transparency of data analysis. Documentation is particularly critical when the codes and data are meant to be publicly shared and examined by the scientific community to evaluate the analysis or adapt the results. The popular approach for documenting computer codes is known as literate programming, which requires preparing a trilingual script file that includes a programming language for running the data analysis, a human language for documentation, and a markup language for typesetting the document. In this article, I introduce markdoc, a software package for interactive literate programming and generating dynamic-analysis documents in Stata. markdoc recognizes Mark-down, LATEX, and HTML markup languages and can export documents in several formats, such as PDF, Microsoft Office .docx, OpenOffice and LibreOffice .odt, LATEX, HTML, ePub, and Markdown.