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Psion file formats

Documentation about the file formats as used by the Psion 5 and 5MX.

Maintenance status: 
No longer maintained or developed

Introduction

The Psion 5(MX) has several built-in applications. They use their own file formats to save data files. Psion has written file conversion utilities for Windows 95, in the form of their PsiWin program. But there are no conversion utilities for other operating systems. Also, Psion is not able to or does not want to release enough data for others to write their own conversion programs. At least, that is what I have gathered through the newsgroups and from other sources.

I have reverse engineered some of the Psion document formats, and have written a small conversion utility for some of them. I release the data format information to the public domain; the conversion utility is licensed by the GNU General Public License, which allows anyone to use it freely. Both are still being updated and refined.

The Psion 5MX uses mostly the same file formats as the Psion 5; other Psion PDA's might be supported too, and even other machines running EPOC32. The Psion Series 3 uses EPOC16, and are not supported.

Current release

Psiconv includes the description of Psion file formats, but you can also download it seperately here. They are written in Psion Word, but Psiconv can (and will) translate them to other formats like HTML for you. The Word, TextEd, Sketch, MBM, Clip Art, Record, Sheet, Userdic and World Data formats are completely documented (TextEd is used for saving OPL files, MBM is a special picture format, Clipart is an internally used picture format, Userdic is used to add words to the internal spellchecker, and World Data contains additional city or country definitions).

Debian packages and Subvesion

Debian packages can be found at the Debian download page.

A browsable Subversion tree can be found at the ViewVC server.

The Subversion archive can be accessed through the following SVN URI:

svn://svn.frodo.looijaard.name/public/psiconv

Downloads



Project | by Dr. Radut