Subject: FITSIO, version 3.7

From: William Pence <pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 17:33:57 -0500

New Versions of FITSIO and VERIFITS 

The new V3.70 release of the FITSIO and VERIFITS software is now available 
via anonymous ftp from  legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov in the /software/fitsio and 
/software/fitsio/verifits directories.  (It may be a couple hours before
our automatic mirroring software copies the new files to these directories).

New features in this release of FITSIO include:

 - new subroutines that compute or verify the checksum keywords, following
   the proposal that was posted here last month by Rob Seaman.

 - a completely new C interface to FITSIO written by Jim Ingham at
   the HEASARC.  This consists of a set of C macro definitions, one for each
   FITSIO subroutine which replace the set of C wrapper routines in the
   previous release and which provide a more nature interface for C 
   programmers.

 - new subroutines to compute the WCS transformation between pixel location
   in an image and celestial coordinates.  These routines use a Fortran
   transcription (provided by Kent Blackburn) of the C WCS routines
   from Classic AIPS that Don Wells announced here last October. 

 - Wild cards ('*' and '?') may be used when specifying a column name

The new VERIFITS release contains 2 new features:

 - it verifies the checksum values if the CHECKSUM and DATASUM keywords are 
   present.

 - it issues a warning if the table column names do not follow the NOST
   recommendations (e.g., unique names (within 8-characters) consisting
   only of letters, digits, and the underscore character).