# 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.