Command's Help file displays incomplete

[Chen Samulsion]

Dear Stata users,

I have found that some community-contributed commands' help file display incomplete. For example -mrtab- written by Ben Jann, when I open its help file by using -help mrtab- (which applys to mrtab.hlp), I found display errors somewhere (I underline the error in red):

includemissing is an enhancement to include and specifies that cases be treated as valid even if all response variables are missing.
includemissing implies include. Specifying includemissing in connection w :casewise} has the effect that cases with missing values
for at least one of the response variables will be treated as valid cases composed of zero responses.

And when I edited the help file, I found the corresponding SMCL script as follows:

{p 4 8 2} {cmd:includemissing} is an enhancement to {cmd:include} and specifies that cases be treated as valid even if all response variables are missing. {cmd:includemissing} implies {cmd:include}. Specifying {cmd:includemissing} in connection with {cmd:casewise} has the effect that cases with missing values for at least one of the response variables will be treated as valid cases composed of zero responses.

So can anybody help me out, thank you!

[William Lisowski]

Do you have the latest version of mrtab installed from SSC? I do not experience the problem you describe with the current version.

. which mrtab
/Users/lisowskiw/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/m/mrtab.ado
*! History:
*! Version 1.02, Hilde Schaeper, 4 August 2003
*! version 2.00, Ben Jann, 20aug2003 ... with intermediate versions to:
*! version 2.20, Ben Jann, 25jun2007
*! version 2.21, Ben Jann, 22jun2019
*! version 2.22, Ben Jann, 16apr2020

Even if you have the latest version, perhaps uninstalling and reinstalling will get you a corrected mrtab.hlp.

[Nick Cox]

I’ve quite often seen this. The usual diagnosis is a small error in writing or parsing SMCL, associated with long lines in the help file, unmatched braces, and the like.

[Chen Samulsion]

Thank you William Lisowski, glad to hear that mrtab has an updated version. In fact I just used mrtab as an example, as Nick Cox said above, the problem I encountered occurred every so often. And thank you Nick Cox as always.