TABLES V2.3 RELEASE NOTES ***************************** TABLES.TTOOLS: A note was added to table help as a pointer to table selectors help. New Tasks: - THSELECT A new thselect task was created, based on hselect. Existing Tasks: - TCALC A bug in the 'not' operator in the stxtools library has been fixed. This affects tcalc and imcalc, and possibly other tasks. - TCOPY tcopy now makes use of $nargs to help decide how to make the correspondence between command-line arguments and task parameters. The input table name can be omitted completely if the input is redirected; that is, the second argument (which would normally be the output table) can be given without the need for a place-holder for the input table name. If outtable is specified but the output is also redirected, the output table will be outtable, and the redirected text will contain only the verbose output. - TDUMP The default value and lower limit for pwidth has been changed to -1, and tdump was modified to interpret a value less than +1 to mean that checking of the page width should be disabled, so each table row will be written to one line of the ascii output file. - THEDIT The messages printed when show=yes now include the new parameter value (and the old value, when updating an existing keyword). In order to set a keyword value to "," or ".", the value must now be specified as "\," or "\." respectively. Requiring "," to be escaped was added as protection against accidentally typing "," instead of ".", which could have very serious consequences. thedit now recognizes "keyword" $I, which is equivalent to i_table, i.e. the table name. $I is used by hedit for the image name, so people are used to using this, and it seemed reasonable to support the same notation for tables. The help file was updated to explain a problem where dates are interpreted as numbers instead of strings (in the BUGS section) - TLINEAR tlinear was modified for the case that a column of weights was specified. If the weight in a row is exactly zero, that row will now be completely excluded when computing the coefficients and the residuals. This will not affect the values of the coefficients, but the "pts in fit" value that is printed will not include rows with zero weight, and the computation of the residuals will be affected. Note that weights are included when computing "chi2", but the "residual rms" and "residual mean" are unweighted averages. - TMATCH Tmatch was not calculating matches correctly when the spherical correction was turned on. This was due to a problem in the stopping criterion for the search. The stopping criterion assumed that the projection of the distance between objects onto the searching axis was monotonic on either side of the closest approach. This was not true if the spherical correction was applied. The fix was to use the projection without the spherical correction as the stopping criterion. - TPRINT The par file for tprint had an upper limit of 160 for pwidth. This upper limit and the limit of 52 on the number of columns that could be printed on one line have been removed. (The limit of 52 columns is still in effect for latex or tex output, however.) - TREBIN A test was added to make sure 'step' is not zero, unless 'start' and 'end' are the same. This is because trebin divides by the step size in order to determine how many output rows there should be. - TSTAT tstat was modified to interpret command-line arguments more sensibly. If the input is redirected, the table name can be omitted, in which case the first command-line argument will be taken to be the column name. If the table contains only one column, the column name does not need to be specified. TABLES.FITSIO: - CATFITS The value of DIMENS in fitsio$format.mip was modified to allow more space for printing the dimensions of an image or the number of columns and rows of a table. catfits used to print "Other_ext" for the extension type, when the type was really IMAGE. This bug was fixed. - STRFITS A compiler-dependent bug that could cause strfits to crash with a segmentation violation was fixed. In a compound if test, the first part of the test usually prevents the second part from being evaluated, and the second part involved a function call with an undefined argument. GFLIB and GILIB libraries: The gf library offers gf_map() as a drop-in replacement for immap() that mimics its functionality while also allowing FITS and GEIS images to be treated identically. A similar change was made to tp_parse, which now adds a filename extension to an image file name that doesn't already have an extension by searching for an existing file with the same root name if the default group count (def_count) is less than or equal to zero or by using the value of the environment variable imtype if def_count is greater than zero. These libraries are being modified for upcoming changes to CALWP2 to support processing of data in FITS format, but no tasks directly depend on this new functionality. TFIELDS and ROOTNAME were added to the list of header keywords that are always retained in the primary header even if present in the extension. TABLES I/O routines: CFITSIO version 2.1 was installed in the tables package. Changes were made in order to make it a little faster to add rows to the end of a FITS table by improving the method of assigned undefined values. An unnecessary function call (to fsirow) was also removed, which can make an order-of-magnitude difference in the time to write a new FITS table if there are a lot of header keywords. This function call was left over from early versions of FITSIO and CFITSIO that did require calling it. The subroutines tbfhpd and tbfhpr (in tbfhp.x) were modified so the header keyword value will be written using G format instead of E format. This change is not supported by the SPP FITSIO interface, however, so the previous version was saved in the source file tbfhp_f.x, and this file is used when running mkpkg with SPPFITSIO defined. Included a bug fix for blsearch provided by Steve Walton. Changes to internal parameters were made so that for text tables and FITS tables, the tbpsta function will return reasonable numbers for row length. A file describing how to install a new version of CFITSIO was added (cfitsio.install). GENERAL LIBRARIES - STXTOOLS Modified tpparse.x to provide better handling of image names without extensions. The vex_not function was fixed.