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.
- Microsoft Word
	
- If the catdoc utility is available on the system,
		PW can use it to import text from MS Word documents.
		All formatting is lost. A better solution is to save
		the file as RTF in Word and then load it in Siag.
 If the mswordview utility is available, PW can use it
		to convert MS Word 97 documents to HTML, which is then
		imported. That way, some formatting can be preserved.
- 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.
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 - June 1999 - ulric@siag.nu