I’m a bit late with Quarto, which I only started to use a few months ago. I’ve heard good news about this new rendering engine for literate coding on Frank Harrell’s blog, but since I rarely write RMarkdown reports these days, I tested the command-line program and then just forgot about it.

However, a few days ago I came across a Neovim plugin which offers all the goodies you might expect to render and/or preview Quarto documents from Neovim directly. I think I found it when browsing about use cases for molten-nvim that I finally kept in my toolbox (I’m rather thrifty in this respect since I only have 8 plugins in my pack folder – no plugin manager, no nvim-lspconfig!). I don’t really care about the plugin itself since I manage to write a one-liner compiler for Vim:

silent CompilerSet makeprg=quarto\ render\ %\ --to\ $*

I don’t really care about messing up with the erroformat since quarto will stop running after the first error.

And for the remaining stuff, I just added set ft=markdown and runtime! ftplugin/markdown.vim to my after/ftplugin/quarto.vim config. That’s all folks!

Anyway, great news for Quarto users using Stata with version below 17: you can declare stata_kernel as a custom kernel rather than the default nbstata. Since I only owe a license for Stata 13 MP, I don’t know what’s new in the Stata world other than what I read on the www, but it works perfectly well, including graphical output. This was the most cumbersome thing I happened to deal with when I was writing my Stata Starter Kit using org-mode some years ago. Since I’m using Stata 13, I needed to export graphics as encapsulated PS file, and then convert them to PNG files. Of course this was automated via a Makefile, but when you find that a version number (13 < 14) prevents you from exporting your figures as PNG or SVG files, it really sucks. Now it’s all over, and I can just write Stata code and let Quarto produce a well-formatted PDF or HTML file using Pandoc. MRE follows.¹

---
title: Hello Stata
author: chl
jupyter:
  kernelspec:
    display_name: Stata
    language: Stata
    name: stata
format:
  html:
    toc: true
    html-math-method: mathjax
    highlight-style: monochrome
    embed-resources: true
    anchor-sections: true
    citations-hover: false
    footnotes-hover: false
    code-copy: true
---

Trying out to run some Stata code:

```{stata}
sysuse auto
su mpg
hist mpg
```

That's it!