This collection of packages for the SILE typesetting system provides (experimental) support for reading and processing spreadsheets, and for rendering them as tables in SILE-generated documents.
The supported formats are:
- OpenDocument Spreadsheet Document (
.ods). - Office Open XML Workbook (
.xlsx).
These packages require SILE v0.14 or upper.
Installation relies on the luarocks package manager.
To install the latest development version and all its dependencies (see below), you may use the provided “rockspec”:
luarocks --lua-version 5.4 install --dev spreadsheet.sile
(Adapt to your version of Lua, if need be, and refer to the SILE manual for more detailed 3rd-party package installation information.)
The collection depends on ptable.sile which is also installed when using the above procedure.
Once the collection is installed, the spreadsheet experimental package is available. It provides basic tools for parsing and processing spreadsheet documents, converting them to tables in output documents.
E.g. in SIL language:
\use[module=packages.spreadsheet]
\spreadsheet[src=<filename>, sheet=<name|number>, header=<boolean>]
The command reads an external spreadsheet file and generates a table.
The sheet option defaults to 1, but may be set to another index or an explicit sheet name, for spreadsheet documents containing several sheets.
The header option (false by default) specifies whether first row should be considered as a header row or not in the generated table.
Please note that the spreadsheets are expected to be reasonably simple: merged cells or rows are not supported, content styling is ignored, etc.
This is sort of a Proof-of-Concept showing how the Lua and SILE ecosystems can be hacked in interesting, though probably unintended, ways.
The current implementation is not very efficient — it doesn't cache anything, for instance. It's not very flexible either — for instance, all columns have the same width and the table is made full-line wide.
You might have better results converting your spreadsheets via other means, to either SIL language or to anything else suitable (e.g. Markdown "pipe tables" for inclusion via markdown.sile, etc.) — Though for quickly including a table in a document, perhaps you'll find this package worth a try?
In other terms, its author himself is not that sure this solution is the right way to go. Who knows, though, what you might do with it?
The code in this repository is released under the MIT License, Copyright 2023, Omikhleia.
Some ZIP-processing code is derived and adapted from LuaRocks, also released under the MIT License, Copyright 2007-2011, Kepler Project, Copyright 2011-2022, the LuaRocks project authors.