Reading tabular data

[Peter Rayner <peter.rayner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I unfortunately have to do this a bit.  I use dismal for this although
this might now have been superceded by ses.  That still can't access
the .xls files directly but the xls2csv program gets me most of the
way there  Note that the dis-field-sep variable is usually set to tab
and you will need to set it to comma 
(setq dis-field-sep ",")
to do this.
I also couldn't get the handling of speaking cells as I landed on them
to work the way I wanted with TVR's set-up (probably I was failing to
set up the summarizers correctly) so wrote the following bits of code
that I load after opening a dismal file
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(defun emacspeak-dismal-next-row-and-speak-cell () "test for the emacspeak-dismal behaviour I want"
  (interactive) 
 (declare (special dismal-current-row dismal-current-column)) 
  (dismal-move-rows 1)
  (emacspeak-dismal-display-cell-with-row-header))

(defun emacspeak-dismal-prev-row-and-speak-cell () "test for the emacspeak-dismal behaviour I want"
  (interactive) 
 (declare (special dismal-current-row dismal-current-column)) 
  (dismal-move-rows -1)
  (emacspeak-dismal-display-cell-with-row-header))



(defun emacspeak-dismal-next-col-and-speak-cell () "test for the emacspeak-dismal behaviour I want"
  (interactive) 
 (declare (special dismal-current-row dismal-current-column)) 
  (dismal-move-columns 1)
  (emacspeak-dismal-display-cell-with-col-header))


(defun emacspeak-dismal-prev-col-and-speak-cell () "test for the emacspeak-dismal behaviour I want"
  (interactive) 
 (declare (special dismal-current-row dismal-current-column)) 
  (dismal-move-columns -1)
  (emacspeak-dismal-display-cell-with-col-header))

             (define-key dismal-map '[up]
               'emacspeak-dismal-prev-row-and-speak-cell)
             (define-key dismal-map '[down]
               'emacspeak-dismal-next-row-and-speak-cell)
             (define-key dismal-map '[left]
               'emacspeak-dismal-prev-col-and-speak-cell)
             (define-key dismal-map '[right]
               'emacspeak-dismal-next-col-and-speak-cell)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hope this helps, and if anyone has nicer solutions to the above code
I'd gladly hear them.

Also, I'd be curious about similar accessibility to LATeX tables
although I realize things like multicolumn make this more difficult.
Probably there is already a nice interface between LATeX tabular
environment and the emacs tabulate environment.
cheers
Peter



-- 
Peter Rayner: LSCE/IPSL, Laboratoire CEA-CNRS-UVSQ
address: Bat. 701 LSCE - CEA de Saclay
Orme des Merisiers, 91191 Gif/Yvette
work: +33  (1) 69 08 88 11;	mobile: +33 (6) 75 46 56 52;	 fax: +33 (1) 69 08 77 16
mail-to: peter.rayner@xxxxxxxxxxx
web: http://www-lsce.cea.fr/Pisp/52/peter.rayner.html

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