External Software
==================

These are some external packages which you might need to use.


.. include:: digitizing_data.rst

Viewing hdf5 files
--------------------
hdf5 has become a popular format for storing data on disk. Unfortunately, it
can be annoying to inspect the data from the command line. There are a few
tools out there to address this task.
I tested **vitables**, which is a GUI that seems to do the job.  It can be
installed with apt. Basically, you can point and click on simple data types,
but not everything.  In any case, it will give you some idea of what the file
contains.

Dealing with docx
------------------
For reasons unknown, people still use MS Word and its clones. If you need to generate content for a docx file,
you can still use latex and convert it to a docx file using pandoc. While this is not perfect, it is 
pretty impressive what pandoc can do. To convert a typical latex document with a bibliography, do

.. code-block:: bash

  pandoc -o main.docx -t docx --bibliography=main.bib main.tex