_                      _   _  __
        | |__   ___  __ _ _   _| |_(_)/ _|_   _
        | '_ \ / _ \/ _` | | | | __| | |_| | | |
        | |_) |  __/ (_| | |_| | |_| |  _| |_| |
        |_.__/ \___|\__,_|\__,_|\__|_|_|  \__, |
                                          |___/

beautify is a Ruby helper that makes it easy to export attractive tables from Stata.

It can take something like this:

And turn it into something like this:

Features

• beautify keeps your Stata code nice and clean:

    webuse citytemp2, clear

    // Beautify setup
    do beautify.do
    beautify_init, filename("output.txt") byvariable("region")

    // Make some pretty tables...
    tab2out agecat, l("agecat")

    // Beautify output
    shell beautify stata --data output.txt --template template.yaml --output ./

• beautify is smart enough to use the variable and value labels in your dataset so you only have to label your data once.
• The HTML output from beautify is nicely formatted and properly paged for printing.

Technology

It relies on the following technology:

• Stata 10 or newer
• Ruby >= 1.9.2
• rubygems
• bundler
• HTML/Javascript/CSS for rendering pretty tables (Google Chrome is best for viewing the .html file created by beautify).

Available commands

tab1out

Equivalent to Stata's tabulate oneway command.

tab1out agecat, l("agecat") creates:

tab2out

Equivalent to Stata's tabulate twoway command.

tab2out agecat, l("agecat_region") creates:

floatsummary

Equivalent to Stata's summarize command. Table columns are grouped by the byvariable.

floatsummary tempjan, l("tempjan") creates:

tabmultout

A multivariable version of the floatsummary command for creating compact tables of summary statistics and statistical significance.

tabmultout temp*, l("mult") creates:

How to use

You should already have a Stata .do file that's running some commands with output you want to export into a prettier format.

Step 0: Install beautify

Make sure you have Ruby first. You can type ruby -v at the command line to check if it's installed. You should see something like:

ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570) [x86_64-darwin11.2.0]

You'll need at least v1.9.2.

If you don't have Ruby installed or your version is too old, there is an installer for Windows. On Mac, the best thing to do is use rbenv.

beautify is not currently on rubygems, so you'll need manually download and install it.

First, download the most recent .gem from github. It's the file called beautify-x.x.x.gem under "Download Packages".

Then run the following at the command prompt:

gem install /path/to/beautify-X.X.X.gem

If you're on Windows and get an error while installing Psych, you should follow these instructions.

Step 1: Bootstrap

beautify relies on a Stata .do file to add some functionality to Stata. You can get this file by running the following at the command line:

beautify bootstrap --output /path/to/your/do/file

This will save a file named beautify.do in the output directory you specify.

Step 2: Modifying your .do file

You will need to add the following to the top of your .do file:

do beautify.do
beautify_init, filename("output.txt") byvariable("group")

You can change group to any integer variable. This is the second variable that beautify will use in two-way tables (e.g. tab2out).

Then, add the following to the end of your .do file:

shell beautify stata --data /path/to/output.txt --template /path/to/template.yml --output /path/to/output/folder

If you use bash instead of zsh, replace .zshrc with .bash_profile or whatever has the $PATH declaration for rbenv.

If you use rbenv, use the following instead:

shell source /path/to/.zshrc && beautify stata --data /path/to/output.txt --template /path/to/template.yml --output /path/to/output/folder

Step 3: Setting up a template.yml file

beautify uses a YAML template file to make the pretty version of your Stata output.

The YAML file should follow this format:

title: title here
subtitle: subtitle here
content:
  - section: "Section name"
    items:
      - heading: "Subsection name heading"
        items:
          - name: "Table name"
            description: "Table description"
            content: name_of_content_in_stata

Example

You can see a functional example of beautify at https://github.com/masnick/beautify-gem/tree/master/example.

License

Copyright 2012 Duke University. All rights reserved.