Fortunately, the vast experience with implementing SPL in the pharmaceutical industry over more than a decade has been founded not on the complicated HL7 version 3 documentation as much as on quite a simple Implementation Guide document. That document is walking the implementer through by examples and "XML snippets", i.e., parts of XML which implementers could copy and paste and edit the data and connect with other snippets that implementation becomes a very practically focused effort. Especially the production of SPL files is not a hard endeavor. The consumption of SPL files may be more involved if the objective is to be able to understand all types of SPL files. However, this is often not necessary, because fortunately SPL files are conceived of as documents so that all formal data elements can have free text presentations including pictures, diagrams, tables and other media. The implementation guide of basic SPL, with substance indexing and the new reaction SPL sections is being made available at .