5 Formatting

This part explains in detail how to extract and interpret cell and in-cell formatting. Earlier sections have used formatting, but haven’t explained exactly how it works. The motivating example is a particularly pernicious gotcha: superscript symbols.

The formatting of a cell is available via a lookup table. Well, not a lookup table – a lookup list-of-lists-(of-lists-)of-vectors. It seems complicated, but in fact it is straightforward to find out a cell’s formatting.

1. Obtain the vector of formats that you need.
2. Look up the cell’s style_format or local_format_id in that vector.