texlink

Stata package for writing publication-ready LaTeX tables and figures directly from Stata. Rather than relying on fixed-format exporters, texlink gives fine-grained control over the LaTeX output by writing raw .tex files line by line, making it straightforward to match any journal style.

Commands

Tables

The standard table workflow is: textablehead → body rows → textablefoot.

Command	Description
textablehead	Opens a .tex file and writes the table preamble: \begin{tabular}, column alignment, \toprule, column numbers, and titles
textablefoot	Appends \bottomrule, tablenotes, and closing environment tags
leanesttab	Thin wrapper around esttab that appends regression results in a clean format
write_summ_stats	Appends summary statistics rows (N, Mean, Min, Max, SD) for a variable list
texbf	Appends a bold (or bold-italic) group heading row
texspec	Appends a specification indicator row with \checkmark marks

Both textablehead and textablefoot support scheme(aea) for AEA journal formatting, landscape, and separate paper/slide output modes.

textablehead using output/tab/reg.tex, ///
    coltitles("OLS" "IV") title(Returns to education) key(tab_main)
leanesttab m_ols m_iv using output/tab/reg.tex
texspec using output/tab/reg.tex, spec(y y) label(Individual controls)
texspec using output/tab/reg.tex, spec(n y) label(Firm FE)
textablefoot using output/tab/reg.tex, ///
    notes(Standard errors clustered at the firm level.) nodate

Figures

Command	Description
latexfigure	Writes a complete \begin{figure}...\end{figure} environment, with support for single figures and multi-panel \subfloat layouts

latexfigure using output/fig/wages.tex, ///
    path(../output/fig) figurelist(wages_m.pdf wages_f.pdf) ///
    rowsize(2) figlab(`" "Men" "Women" "') ///
    title(Wages by gender) key(fig_wages)

Writing inline numbers

Command	Description
writetext	Writes a single formatted number to a file for \input{} into LaTeX text
writelntc	Writes \newcommand definitions to a file
writeln	Low-level utility: appends an arbitrary line to a file

sum wages
writetext, file(output/text/mean_wage.tex) text(`r(mean)')
writelntc using output/text/macros.tex, command(\Nobs) text(`r(N)') start

Graph styling

Command	Description
grscheme	Initialises a plotplain-based graph scheme with a named colour palette via grstyle and colorpalette

grscheme, ncolor(4) palette(Set1)

Paper vs. slide output

Commands that write .tex files accept slide and mod options to direct output to filename_slide.tex or filename_paper.tex respectively, keeping paper and presentation outputs in sync from a single do-file.

Installation

net install texlink, from("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cesarlgm/texlink/main") replace

Or from a local clone:

net install texlink, from("/path/to/texlink") replace

Requirements

• Stata 14 or later
• esttab (from SSC) for leanesttab
• grstyle, colorpalette, and symbolpalette (from SSC) for grscheme
• LaTeX packages: booktabs, threeparttable, adjustbox, subfig, makecell (and pdflscape for landscape tables/figures)

Author

César Garro-Marín, University of Edinburgh — cgarrom@ed.ac.uk