Subject: FITSIO V3.20

From: pence at heawk1.gsfc.nasa.gov ( William Pence)
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1992 23:27:39 GMT

FITSIO - Version 3.20
                           30 March 1992

This is to announce that Version 3.20 of the FITSIO package is now
available.  FITSIO provides a very powerful yet simple Fortran
subroutine interface for reading and writing FITS format files.  The
great majority of the FITSIO subroutines are written in strict ANSI
standard Fortran, and a small set of machine-specific subroutines are
also provided to use FITSIO on most commonly used computers and
workstations.  FITSIO supports the FITS ASCII and binary table
extensions as well as the proposed new IMAGE extension.

This new 3.20 Version of FITSIO contains many enhancements over the
previous release, including:

 - Support for the proposed new IMAGE extension.

 - Support for bit and byte columns in binary tables.  
   Subroutines are now provided to read or write individual bits in
   these columns.

 - New capability to  dymanically increase the size of the FITS file if more
   space is needed for new keywords.  FITSIO will also recover and re-use
   space that is freed when a keyword is deleted.  These enhancements
   now make it  practical to use FITS format files in processing 
   environments where the contents of existing FITS files need to be 
   modified.

 - Improved byte-swapping algorithm in the VAX/VMS version; it is 
   about 6 times faster than before.

 - Significantly smaller executable code size obtained by decreasing
   the size of several large common blocks.

 - Several new subroutines:

     - to read or write any contiguous rectangular subset of pixels in an
       N-dimensional FITS image.
     - to modify the value and/or comment string in an existing keyword record
     - to write the current system date into a DATE keyword in dd/mm/yy format
     - to return a descriptive text string corresponding to a given status
       error number
     - to copy  an entire extension from an input FITS file to an output file

 - Several bugs in the previous version have been identified and fixed.

 - Improved documentation and more example programs to illustrate how to
   use the FITSIO library.

This new version of FITSIO is 100% upwardly compatible with the previous
3.10 version, so existing programs should run without any modification.

The FITSIO software, documentation, and example programs are available via
anonymous ftp from:

       ftp tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
                or
       ftp 128.183.8.77

Then type the following:

        ftp>  user anonymous
        Password:               [type your username as a password]
        ftp>  cd pub/fitsio3    [to move to the version 3 subdirectory]
        ftp>  ls                [to see a list of the available files]
        ftp>  get read.me       [contains latest information about FITSIO]
        ftp>  get fitsio.doc    [complete user documentation]
        ftp>  get ...           [get any additional desired files]
        ftp>  quit

Alternatively, the FITSIO files may be copied from following SPAN node:

   NDADSA::HEASARC:[EXOSAT.XANADU.FITS.FITSIO] 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. William Pence                 (Internet)  pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
HEASARC                           (SPAN)      LHEAVX::PENCE
Code 668                          Telephone:  (301)286-4599
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771
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