A Release Notes

This section includes the release notes for the more recent versions of SPECX. This is especially important for the unix versions since the main Specx user manual does not include any of the new features that were not part of SPECX V6.3.

A.1 V6.7-7

Minor patches:

• Add wideband support to DAS-MERGE command
• FITS DATE header is now Y2K compliant
• Fix problem translating some dates from the GSD header value due to a loss of precision.
• Fix problem reading old GSD files that did not know about rastering.

A.2 V6.7-6

This release is primarily a Y2K bug fix release and also includes an updated form of SUN/17.

New commands:

• Add commands to simplify reading of wideband spectra (READ-DUAL-GSD and READ-WIDE-SPECTRUM)

Bug fixes:

• Fix problems with year 2000
• Allow byte-swapping during FITS reading (was an option that did nothing previously)
• Read and write Y2K form of DATE-OBS FITS keyword

A.3 V6.7-5

This is a maintenance update to modify the build system to continue to use Starlink-PGPLOT. There is no change to functionality.

A.4 V6.7-4

At this update the graphics devices not available to GKS/PGPLOT have been removed from the graphics devices file (various terminal types and gif files). There is also a fix to prevent an error when using colour PostScript devices.

A.5 V6.7-3

This is a minor update to correct the graphics device names to use the GKS/PGPLOT device names, and to fix a bug in the plotting system that caused problems for PostScript devices.

A.6 V6.7-2

This release includes a fix to the calculation of integration times from RASTER maps and some bug fixes.

The changes include:

• Correct calculation of integration time for Raster data.

  This version correctly calculates the equivalent "on+off" integration time for on-the-fly spectra (e.g. a raster time of 5 seconds in a 55 by y raster will show up in SPECX as an integration time of about 17 seconds). This change means that you now can safely average raster data with regular "on+off" spectra or different size raster maps.

  Also, note that if you want to combine new rasters with raster data in existing SPECX files, you’ll either have to read the old GSD raster files again or you’ll have to change the integration time in the headers of the data in the old SPECX files:

  $$INT\text{\_}TIME=INT\text{\_}TIME\ast \frac{4}{1+\sqrt{55}}$$

  for a raster with 55 points per row.

• Now correctly reads CLASS format FITS data via READ-FITS-SPECTRUM
• A new variable has been added which gives access to the max and min values used for greyscale plots. The new symbol is MAPLIMITS(2), e.g.,
    >> print maplimits(1)

  would print the minimum value used for the last greyscale. This is sometimes useful from scripts.

• GET-SPECTRUM-FROM-MAP now sets the scan number stored in the header to the position of the spectrum in the map. This was to get over a problem encountered when writing spectra to data files that had scan numbers of 0.

Minor technical changes:

• GSD-PREFIX can now be 32 characters instead of 16.
• The title used for dual channel data (eg RxB3) is now constructed correctly.
• System calls are now performed with the SH command on Solaris (this is 10 times faster than the equivalent SYSTEM command since a .cshrc file is not sourced). This means that different system source files must be used on Alpha and Solaris systems.

A.7 V6.7-1

This is the first full Starlink/JAC release of SPECX for and includes significant new functionality added at the JAC.

Changes to include functionality similar to that found in the VMS version:

• command line editing
• exception handling (CTRL C)

Other changes:

• NEW-PLOT and OVERLAY now accept a color index (1-15) as second argument. If the color index is negative, each subband (quadrant) of a spectrum is plotted with a different color. The default is now retained in the dump.
• Auto Y-axis scaling for NEW-PLOT, R-L-B etc now looks only at points in current X-axis range. Still no autoscaling within interactive graphics however.
• READ-GSD-DATA now also checks DATADIR for gsd files after current directory (setenv DATADIR ... before starting Specx). Has also been speeded up significantly. Reads all subscans at once. Drawback: won’t re-read the disk file (even when altered) until another GSD file has been read.
• DAS-MERGE default for DC adjust changed to ’N’. DAS-MERGE has been changed from a script to a FORTRAN coded command.
• SET-INTERACTIVE now ’N’ upon entry to SPECX.
• REGRID has been rewritten to be more robust. ** It has new questions ** The original functionality is retained, but it also allows you specify the final number of channels and the centre (in current x-units) of the regridded spectrum.
• PLOT-LINE-PARS: the bug that cause a crash when not plotting a linear sequence of parameter maps (e.g 1, 2, 3) has now been fixed.
• INDEX-FILE, COMPRESS-FILE, LIST-MAP allow limits on scan nr and offset positions if more than 25 scans.
• New NDF map format - much faster. Version 4.1 maps WILL BE COPIED to the new format.

New commands:

• DAS-MERGE is now a FORTRAN subroutine i.s.o. a Specx Macro.
• WRITE-FITS-CUBE (under test).
• INFO-FILE (update NDF spectral file header information: for use with SPECX macros. Ensures SPECX variables refer to indicated file.)
• READ-GSD-RASTER (under test: directly reads all subscans from GSD file into a SPECX file with an optional DAS-MERGE along the way. Much faster than SPECX do-loop). Use the new MERGE-FILES command to average overlapping spectra read with this command.

A.8 V6.6

Added support for GSD files.

A.9 V6.5

First released version. No GSD support.

A.10 V6.4

First unix beta release. A port of the VMS SPECX version 6.3.

A.11 V6.1 – VMS

This was a VAX only release.

• expression_evaluation 23-12-90 (see NEWS...)
• new_functions 29-12-90 (see NEWS...)
• fixed bug in parser : can now do » <symbol> arg1....
• added N_FSSP, FSS_INTS, RLB_INTS, changed name to BLF_INTS
• fixed bug in default intervals for F-S-S, R-P-B etc
• fixed bug in X-V plots (sometimes came out negative)
• fixed bug in GEN_SPRINT, can now format strings
• discovered bug in map_cells .ne. integers
• fixed bug in R-G-MAP error return
• size of header characters on CONTOUR - not affected by s-p-par?
• size of header characters in P-L-P - reset to expand=1.0 after first plot
• fixed bug in OPEN-MAP; left flag for map open set when crashed on entering from dump (led to subsequent crash on add-to-map).
• fixed GRID-SPECTRUM for grids of one row or column only
• added frequency polynomial correction for AOSC etc, modified MKHIS etc to plot such scans correctly. Modified XTRANS and XSNART so that MOST data reduction routines now work correctly even with polynomial data.
• fixed a but in GETPTS in that it didn’t prompt with first set of defaults.
• added parameters NC etc for CENTRD, STATS to list of built-in parameters
• fixed bug in BINDAT to trap too few binning points.