Notes on Child Documents

There are a variety of reasons you might want to keep parts of your document in several separate files. Perhaps you have some HTML or CSS that you want to include with every file on your website (to provide style or navigation). Perhaps you have the same Stata code that you use to set up the same examples for several separate documents.

In the context of Stata’s dynamic documents, the first place you might look is at the dynamic tag <<dd_include: filename >>. There are a few details you should be aware of.

• The filename itself should be an unquoted string. Even if the filename has spaces in it!
• Stata macros are not expanded in most dynamic tags. You need an explicitly specified filename.
• Stata code in the included file is not processed. It is interpreted merely as Markdown-formatted text. If you have a child code block, save it as a do file, and execute it with a do, run, or include command inside <<dd_do>> - <</dd_do>> dynamic tags.
• You probably don’t want to include an HTML file that includes Stata log results. This will be processed as Markdown, so the top and bottom borders of Stata results tables may be interpreted as theme breaks and setext headers. You can prevent this by surrounding your include tag with code fences, but then your HTML will be uninterpreted.

There are a variety of web methods for including one HTML page within another. You could include the code for one of these within your document in the right place. Advising you which method to use is a bit beyond my scope.

Bottom line: <<dd_include>> is intended for pure text/Markdown or pure HTML inclusions. Be aware that text mixed with HTML will be interpreted as Markdown. For Stata code or results inclusions, think instead of <<dd_do>>.