Miscellaneous Commands

\toc This command turns on table of contents generation. The table of contents will be generated as the last page of the table. The page heading will be the title of the entire table, as given in the \head command. Each entry will be triggered by the presence of a \ti command either in the main stub file or in any stub files called by \add. If table of contents generation is turned on, then each table title will be preceeded by the text: “TABLE 1.”, “TABLE 2.”, etc. Page numbers in the table of contents will have the page prefix tacked on, as given by the \pageprefix command.

\ts

\timestamp or \ts

This command will specify the printing of a date and time, centered at the bottom of each page. This is the date and time that the table was generated.

\mem

This command reports the amount of memory that currently is available. If you are working with large Interdyme matrices or long @csum() commands, you might bump into memory limits.

\tell

This command tells the time and date on the screen to aid in timing the creation of tables.

\announce <announcement>

This command is useful if you want to announce when a certain portion of a stub file is being processed, either for debugging reasons or just to monitor how far you are in the process. If you are using a lot of \add files, you might want to put an \announce command near the top of each one so you can trace when each one is done.

\at (or \aggtype)

\at (or \aggtype)

This command changes the way that data are calculated “at annual rates”. This is a subject that is clouded by the fact that people do not agree on what is meant by “annual rates.” The Inforum approach, which is the default (”\at i”), yields annualized growth rates that exactly are the frequency of the data times the period growth rates. This internally is consistent and gives annualized growth rates that yield the same numbers as the corresponding annual growth rates. The BEA approach, which seems to have been adopted by just about everyone else (the CEA, the Fed and the Washington Post, to name a few), is to take the period-to-period ratio to the n-th power (where n is the frequency) and then subtract 1.0 and multiply by 100. In other words, where xt is the current quarter and x0 is the previous quarter, this method is calculated by the following formula:

\[100.0\times\left(\exp\left(4.0\times\log\left(\frac{xt}{x0}\right)\right)-1.0\right)\]

It is not clear what is meant by “annual rates” in this sense, but this is approach often is employed. To use the BEA approach, give the command “\at b”.

\ar

Use if monthly or quarterly data is given at annual rates (the default). “ar” indicates “annual rates.”

\pr

Use if monthly or quarterly data is given at monthly or quarterly rates, where “pr” signifies “period rates.” Note that it only makes sense to compare period and annual rates if the growth type is exponential (‘e’).