DiGrande.it

Blind, Braille and Embossing Technologies

This site uses cookies to personalize content and ads, provide social media features and analyze links. By closing this banner or continuing to browse, you consent to their use.
Read the DiGrande.it Cookie Policy

The file types that Biblos can manage

Biblos can manage in opening and saving some types of files. It is useful to distinguish between three categories of formats: native formats; office formats; user formats.

Natively Biblos has more opening and saving filters. It means that Biblos does not use external software, but manages them internally. A native format is always manageable using only Biblos. Some native formats are only opening, other formats have different behaviours between opening and saving.

1. Biblos document (*.EBIBLOS). This is the proper format of Biblos. It is an opening and saving format with which all Biblos word processing elements are stored, even the special ones useful for braille. Especially when working with braille, it is indispensable to use this format, in order to guarantee the management of all elements;

2. Biblos protected document (*.EBIBLOS). It is a format similar to the Biblos Document. During the saving it allows to protect the document with a password, a password which must be inserted during the opening in order to open the document. Protected documents can be opened only by those who know the password with which they were created. The data in the document is completely encrypted using secure cryptographic algorithms;

3. Biblos Model (*.EBIBLOT). It is the format of Biblos that serves as a starting template for other documents. A template allows you to prepare a new Biblos document with certain characteristics. When you open a Biblos template you will always have a new document with the specified template. The structure of Biblos Template is similar to that of Biblos Document;

4. Rich Text Document (*.RTF). It is a document format created by Microsoft, recognized by all word processing software. Some special elements of Biblos, such as those dedicated to braille, cannot be stored in this document format. RTF files of Biblos are in Unicode standard, so they can be opened only by word processing software that accept Unicode, and not by obsolete software that uses only ANSI. To open RTF documents, Biblos opens RTF Unicode and ANSI, with any character encoding, provided that these encodings are installed in your operating system;

5. Rich View of Biblos (*.RVF). This format has a structure similar to that of Biblos Document. It is not recognized by other word processing software and is maintained only for a compatibility with the past. It is recommended not to use it, using the safer Biblos Document;

6. Biblos HTML document (*.HTML;*.HTM). Document in Hyper Text Markup Language, the classic language of the web. In opening and saving this format could have different behaviors. Saved documents respect as much as possible the layout of the source documents. When opening, not all HTML structure is taken into account. It is recommended to use this format only when saving or only when opening files;

7. Markdown document (*.MD). Markdown is a markup language with a simple text syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats. Biblos transparently handles all Markdown formatting;

8. ANSI Text (*.TXT). This format is used to open and save simple text files using the ANSI encoding set in the operating system. Plain text documents cannot have structure and formatting, so its use is discouraged in favor of more appropriate formats, such as Biblos Document and Rich Text Document;

9. MS-DOS text (*.TXT;*.ASC). Format for opening and saving plain text files encoded for MS-DOS (OEM Multilingual Latin I - Western Europe). This format is maintained for compatibility with older TXT files. It is strongly discouraged to use it to continue saving text;

10. Unicode UTF8 text (*.TXT). Format for opening and saving documents in UTF8 plain text, a multibyte encoding that allows retaining all characters of the Unicode set;

11. Unicode UTF16 text (*.TXT). Format for opening and saving plain text documents with 16-bit Unicode encoding;

12. Encoded text (*.TXT). Format for opening and saving plain text documents by choosing the character encoding. During opening and saving, the list with all character encodings is shown, from which you choose the one you want to open or save the text with;

13. DOCX document (*.DOCX). DOCX files are usually documents created with Microsoft Word. Biblos natively can open and save documents in this format. The DOCX format maintains the text formatting as with the RichText format;

14. EPUB document (*.EPUB). A very popular digital book document for eBooks. Biblos opens only EPUB version 2 without DRM protection. During the opening Biblos tries to respect as many XHTML tags as possible, but not all tags are correctly interpreted. It is recommended to use this format only as an importer or exporter, and not as an opening/editing/saving format. When saving, the layout and formatting of the text are almost entirely respected. When creating an EPUB it is advisable to use saving as the final EPUB export operation, and to use the EBIBLOS Document format as the actual saving format of the original document;

15. PDF Document (*.PDF). Import-only format for PDF files. Only the textual part is extracted from PDF documents;

16. Binary file (*.*). Biblos opens any other file giving a binary representation. It is possible to analyze the structure of a file byte by byte, with the possibility to modify the single bytes and re-memorize them in the same file. This format should be used by experienced people, especially for saving. The representation of it is in hexadecimal bytes, alternating lines of hexadecimal codes and their textual representation.

If conversion components are installed in the operating system - installed with old versions of Microsoft Office or with a package of 2010 called File Format Converters - with Biblos it is possible to open and save also DOC or DOCX documents. The package named File Format Converters is obsolete. It is recommended to abandon the use of DOC files and use natively with Biblos DOCX files.

User formats allow you to assign file extensions to open and save using native or Office formats. Associating an extension to an opening and saving format can be done in two ways:

1. When opening a file, when Biblos asks you to choose the opening format;

2. From the general options, in the Formats tab there are tools to manage all user formats.