All my ex-Github repos are now stored and maintained at my personal website.
Why did I leave Github? Because I consider the compulsory imposition of 2-factor authentication to be inappropriate for people writing software, including cryptography, which can attract severe punishments in certain jurisdictions. We all know that the organisations that hold the 2nd factors (mobile telephony providers, tech companies) are compromised, willingly or otherwise, in their relationships with security agencies, benign or otherwise.
Why not just close it down? Because you might use it programmatically, via http or API, and I don't want to hurt you (by breaking your code) while trying to help you (by raising issues of privacy and confidentiality).
This project is released under The Unlicense. You can do whatever you want with it.
html_start writes head information including CSS (of my own choosing, but basically who doesn't like clean simple Helvetica and look-alikes). The Boolean argument auto_h1 determines whether or not a header is written at the top of the visible content containing the projecttitle.
html_unitab makes a table describing one categorical variable. You can choose to include or exclude missing data with the Boolean argument include_missing.
html_multitab makes a table for a series of dichotomous variables (which must be coded 0 and 1), supplied as columns of a data frame or matrix with suitable colnames.
html_anytab takes a matrix or data frame and turns it into a table. Rownames and colnames populate the first column and the header row respectively. Whatever is in the matrix/data frame gets written, so do your formatting in R first. The usual tableno, caption and handle arguments are used.
All the table functions above write a caption with a table number (default 1) and return an integer which is the next table number, so it makes sense to feed this into the next function call, and so on.
html_p writes text in a paragraph tag. Boolean arguments strong, em, caption determine the look of it while col receives text to write into the color style, so here you can use CSS names, CSS rgb function or hex names.
html_h writes a heading; the level argument determines whether it's h1, h2, etc.; the default is 2.
html_img writes a link to a image file. Default width is 560, and like unitab and multitab, you can specify a caption, and it returns the next figureno.
Note that throughout these, the default file handle is 'con', so if you call it that, you can just omit the argument.
Q: Help, you haven't told me enough about it
A: Read the code, sucka! You'll find the options clear enough to follow in the .R and .do files.
Q: Why don't you add X?
A: The to-do list includes cross-tabulations and tables of descriptive stats given data. Interactive graphics and other JavaScript content is not really the goal here, though it could be bridged in from functions like R2leaflet without too much difficulty. If you want something else, fork it (but attempt nothing without the gloves).
Q: Will this ever get made into a package?
A: Maybe, but I don't feel any need to do that right now. It's made for my own use and if you find it useful too, great. Proper documentation would be a faff and people would keep asking for control over the CSS etc, which is best done to personal taste. It's pretty easy to just source() it in. But be my guest if you want to take that on.
Q: It's OK, but I like my outputs to have X
A: Good. Edit the code to get X. You can keep it, share it, pretend that you wrote it, whatever. That's what it's for. In conversation with Stata-to-HTML-writing supremo Ben Jann, we both felt that everyone should write their own HTML reporting program. Seriously. But you can use this as a springboard to get going.
You should open the file connection first, probably like this: file open con using "myoutput.html", write text replace. Notice that I call the file handle con. This is fairly common, and it's the default for all the commands that follow, so calling it con at the beginning means never having to specify it afterwards.
html_start writes out all the header HTML and CSS you need. Remember that the look you get can be tweaked by changing html-reports.do to the CSS of your liking. You probably want to specify the option projecttitle(string) or no_h1, otherwise you'll get a h1 heading at the top with the default name "My Project", which will look a bit silly, even if it is your project.
html_unitab myvar makes a univariate frequency table of myvar. There is an option tableno(integer), which is 1 by default. This is used in all the table-writing commands. I suggest you create a macro at the outset for your table numbering: global tabn 1, then include it like this so it increments:
html_unitab myvar, tableno($tabn)
global ++tabn
html_multitab varlist expects varlist to be a bunch of binary indicator variables, such as you get from the tab1 ... , gen() option.
html_xtab makes a crosstab. This is a hell of a lot harder than it seems at first.
html_h, text("Check this out!") level(2) will insert a heading in HTML (h2 in this case, because of the level option).
html_img, img_file(mygraph.png) figureno($fign) caption("Data can be seen to be on the left and the right") will insert an image file with the desired caption. Note the figureno() option which mirrors the tableno one.
html_p, text("We then ran some really clever analyses.") color(#4682b4) will insert a paragraph with the desired text, coloured steelblue. Any color specification is written straight into CSS; it doesn't have to be understood by Stata. There's also a strong option for bold type, and em for italix. If you look closely at the code, you'll see a blocking option which allows you to have paragraphs that get expanded and collapsed to save space. You need to name the blocks and include that in html_start too though. Let's leave that for the more confident coder.
html_list, ordered text("the first thing I want to say is this") start will start an ordered (numbered) list. Then, continue with simpler: html_list, text("and another thing is this"), before ending thus: html_list, text(and finally, this") end.
html_end when you're done. Don't forget to close the file connection.