File Formats
Pathetic Writer has support for several file formats:
- Pathetic Writer
- Native Pathetic Writer format, with support for
formatting attributes (fonts,
widths and so on). Very nice for Pathetic Writer documents, but
totally incompatible with anything else.
- Plain Text
- Text without formatting information.
- Postscript
- Pathetic Writer can output pretty decent Postscript code, with
DSC comments and all to make the resulting files
post-processable. Normally, this code goes straight
to the printer or to Ghostview for previewing, but
it can also be saved in a file. Pathetic Writer cannot load
Postscript files.
- Hypertext Markup Language
- HTML as featured on the World Wide Web.
Pathetic Writer can save and load documents
in this format. Some effort is made to preserve the
formatting so that the documents will look nice when
they are viewed in a browser like Netscape or Chimera.
Some formatting may be lost when loading HTML files.
- Rich Text Format
- Documents can be saved in RTF format so that they can be
opened in legacy Windows (TM) applications. PW can load
RTF files, but some formatting information may be lost.
- PDF
- Adobe's "Portable Document Format". Loading requires the
program pdftohtml, saving requires ps2pdf.
- Microsoft Word
- If the wvHtml utility is available on the system,
PW can use it to import text from MS Word documents.
Some formatting may be lost. A better solution is to save
the file as RTF in Word and then load it in Siag.
If wvHtml is not installed, mswordview and/or
catdoc can be used instead.
- AUIS ez
- Reads documents created by the ez word processor
from the Andrew system, using 2rtf to first
convert to RTF. 2rtf is distributed with ez.
- Psion Word
- Uses psiconv to convert Psion Word files to HTML which
can be loaded by PW.
Adding Format Handlers
PW can use external converters to convert files from formats it
can't handle directly to ones it does handle. The converters are registered
by the function register-converters; see pw.scm for the default
implementation of that function.
Ulric Eriksson - November 2000 - ulric@siag.nu