Making help files the easy way
Adrian Mander · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2018
The command makehlp was released in July 2012. It is a command for simplifying the construction of a help file by a SMCL help template. The command opens up the ado file and from the syntax line produces a template help file. In the past the user would need to edit this template and fill in the details such as the description, title, examples, etc. The new version of makehlp keeps the old functionality but also checks for the return codes to automatically produce a list of stored outputs. In addition a new syntax is introduced so that all the necessary text can be included in the ado file, for the various sections such as: description, title, examples, author, references, see also and all the options and returns descriptions. An example of the new syntax is desc[], which will place all the text between the brackets into the help file description and will be formatted as it is written, so SMCL commands are allowed. This means that the ado-file can store the majority of the help file and the help file can subsequently be created using this ado file.