<html> <head> <title>Siag - File Formats</title> </head> <body> <center> <h1>File Formats</h1> </center> Siag has support for these file formats: <dl> <dt><b>Siag</b> <dd>Native Siag format, with support for Scheme and C-style expressions as well as formatting attributes (fonts, widths and so on). Very nice for Siag documents, but totally incompatible with anything else. <dt><b>Comma Separated Values</b> <dd>Almost every spreadsheet can load and save this format, but all expressions are lost. Despite its name, any character can be used as field separator. <dt><b>Plain Text</b> <dd>Every line is loaded as a label and placed in column 1 of successive rows. <dt><b>Lotus 1-2-3</b> <dd>Siag imports documents in Lotus Worksheet format and can save values in the same format. <dt><b>Postscript</b> <dd>Siag 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. Siag cannot load Postscript files. <dt><b>HTML Tables</b> <dd>Hypertext Markup Language as featured on the World Wide Web. A spreadsheet maps nicely to the HTML table format, and Siag can save and load (well-behaved) documents in this format. <dt><b>Scheme Code</b> <dd>Files containing Scheme code can be loaded and evaluated. <dt><b>Troff Tables</b> <dd>Tables which can be processed by tbl to produce input to the troff document formatting system. <dt><b>LaTeX Tables</b> <dd>Tables which can be included in documents using the LaTeX typesetting package. <dt><b>Excel</b> <dd><i>Very</i> incomplete support for MS Excel (loading only). This requires the <i>xls2csv</i> utility which is not part of Siag. A better way to convert Excel files to Siag is to save them as Lotus worksheets (see below) in Excel and then load them in Siag. <dt><b>PDF</b> <dd>Siag can save in Adobe's "Portable Document Format". Requires the program ps2pdf. </dl> <h2>Adding Format Handlers</h2> Siag 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 siag.scm for the default implementation of that function. <hr> <address>Ulric Eriksson - June 1999 - ulric@siag.nu</address> </body> </html>
