DIPSO is, historically, a simple plotting package incorporating some basic astronomical applications.
If you just want to read in some data, plot them, and measure some equivalent widths or fluxes, you
can do that without much effort. First-time users with this type of modest goal can skim through the
documentation to get a feel for what’s going on, then check the command reference section to find the
commands required. You could even go straight to the terminal, and type DIPSO
; there’s no substitute
for hands-on experience. However, DO read the documentation fully at some time; DIPSO can do a
lot of things, some of which you might not know that you needed until you read about
them....
While it is intended that simple things should be simple, an effort has been made to make complicated things possible. To this end, a number of rather rudimentary functions and free parameters are provided (with reasonable defaults set). A macro facility allows convenient execution of regularly used sequences of commands, and a simple FORTRAN interface permits “personal” software to be very simply integrated. The existence of this interface has encouraged the accretion of several codes for carrying out relatively elaborate numerical or astrophysical calculations (e.g. profile fitting, Fourier analysis, nebular continuum modelling). Because it has a monolith structure, DIPSO still runs fast, but there is, unfortunately, quite a lot of documentation to wade through to find the command you need. Still, you should persevere; somewhere, somehow, it is quite likely that DIPSO can indeed do what you want. (However, if you want to display images, or handle errors in a general way without doing a bit of coding, look elsewhere. You’ll probably have to come back to DIPSO eventually in the latter case, though — and do a bit of coding!)
New features in this release, and some history related to earlier releases are contained in appendix B.