Subject: Updates to FITSIO and FTOOLS

From: William Pence <pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 14:08:21 -0500

This note describes a number of important new features available in the
latest FITSIO and FTOOLS releases from the HEASARC at NASA/GSFC.

1. FITSIO Subroutine Library Update

The FITSIO library of subroutines to read and write FITS files has been
significantly enhanced in the past few months, so users of this package
should obtain the latest version to take advantage of the new
features.  FITSIO is available from the legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov ftp
account in the /software/fitsio and /software/fitsio/cfitsio directories.
The recent improvements include:

 - The new "FITSIO Cookbook" document provides programming guidelines
   and annotated listings of many example programs that use FITSIO to
   read or write FITS files.  Programmers may adapt these programs for
   their own use.

 - The CFITSIO wrapper routines for calling FITSIO from C programs have
   been more thoroughly tested and upgraded from a beta release to a
   fully supported release.

 - One can now easily insert or delete rows in an existing FITS table
   using the new ftirow or ftdrow routines.  These may be used even if
   the FITS table is followed by other FITS extensions.

 - FITSIO has been further ported to run on Cray supercomputers, on HP 9000
   series computers, and on IBM PCs using the Linux Unix-like operating
   system.  Linux users should note that older versions of FITSIO may
   produce incorrect results when dealing with Byte arrays (BITPIX=8)
   or Byte columns in binary tables due to a 'feature' in the f2c
   compiler.

 - FITSIO now does range checking to detect and trap any numerical
   overflows whenever the FITS data is scaled or whenever implicit data 
   type conversion is performed.

 - An 'Error Message' stack has been added to FITSIO to provide more
   detailed information about any error conditions.

 - FITSIO now supports the new OGIP convention for long string keyword
   values that are continued over multiple header keywords.

 - Better support for all the IEEE floating point special values has
   been added.

 - A new set of routines is available that will update the value of a
   keyword if it already exists or write a new keyword if it doesn't exist.

 - A new set of routines is avaiable to read any consecutive set of
   bits as an unsigned integer from a bit ('X') or byte ('B') column in 
   a binary table.

 - FITSIO now performs more detailed verification checks to ensure that
   any FITS file that it reads or writes conforms to the FITS Standard.

 - New subroutines have been added (a) to get an available logical unit
   number for use when opening or creating a FITS file, and (b) to delete 
   a file.

 - Many other small enhancements and bug fixes have been added.

2.  New FTOOLS Release

Version 3.2 of the FTOOLS package has just been released on
legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov in the /software/ftools/release ftp directory.
FTOOLS is a collection of more than 100 programs that perform various
operations on FITS format files.  Users of FTOOLS now have the option
to either install the entire FTOOLS package, which includes many
High-Energy Astrophysics related tasks, or just build the 'core' set of
FTOOLS that perform more generic types of operations on any FITS file.
As in previous releases, FTOOLS may be built as a package within the IRAF
data analysis system or as a standalone set of executable tasks that
are run directly from the operating system prompt.  FTOOLS is supported
on the following platformes:

      unix         ALPHA/OSF, DEC/ULTRIX, SUN/SunOS, Sun/Solaris,
                       MODCOMP/REALIX,
       vms          ALPHA/VMS, VAX/VMS

Any questions or comments about FTOOLS should be sent to
ftoolshelp at athena.gsfc.nasa.gov

Bill Pence
pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
HEASARC, NASA/GSFC