maptile_geohelp does not launch in command line mode

[dalek2point3]

When running stata in command line mode maptile_geohelp does not launch

[michaelstepner]

Thanks for the report.

I'm not sure how to fix it. The -view- command is what opens and renders smcl file, except apparently it doesn't work in Stata's console mode. Some quick googling doesn't turn up any commands that do print an smcl file to the console window. Although Stata no doubt has this ability, because all Stata help files are written in SMCL, and help regress for example just prints the whole file to the console window.

Do you have any suggestions for how to display an SMCL file in Console Stata using existing Stata commands? (The alternative route would be writing an ado program that does so, which is definitely feasible.)

[dalek2point3]

I'm not sure. It's strange because "help maptile" works just fine. Its just that the geography help files dont show up. Is the code doing anything different for the geography files vs. the maptile file?

[michaelstepner]

Yes, the code for help and maptile_geohelp is different, even though the format of the file being opened is the same. And programming maptile_geohelp to do the same thing as help isn't an option.

Eventually, I will likely have to write a program that manually handles printing smcl files in Console Stata. In the meantime, as workarounds, I'd suggest:

1. Running maptile_geohelp in GUI Stata if that's available to you.
2. Instead of running maptile_install using "http://files.michaelstepner.com/geo_<GEONAME>.zip", paste that URL into your browser and download the zip file to your computer. (Or use wget if you're on a computer without any GUI.) Unzip it, and open the SMCL file in a text editor. It won't look pretty, but you can read it.

[dalek2point3]

Thanks for the workaround! This is surely not a high-priority issue, but thought I would document it as a to-do for some time in the future ... I have access to gui, but I can see people using this on servers who might run into problems.

[michaelstepner]

I've added it to my to-do list, as a "do this eventually when you're next working on maptile" kind of thing. Thanks again for reporting!

[michaelstepner]

@dalek2point3, I think I've fixed this issue in the latest commit on the develop branch.

The solution came from a suggestion from @wbuchanan on Statalist.

@dalek2point3, I tested it out on my computer, but if you'd like to test the bug fix on your computer, you could run:

ssc uninstall maptile
net install maptile, from(https://github.com/michaelstepner/maptile/raw/develop)

I haven't updated the version of maptile in the SSC with this bug fix yet, but the command above will install maptile directly from the develop branch of the repo.

[michaelstepner]

This fix was merged into v1.0.5 of maptile in commit fb5deb1. It's now available on Stata's SSC.