UNIX/IRAF Site Manager's Guide

UNIX/IRAF Site Manager's Guide

5.3. Image display devices

The standard image display facility for a Sun workstation running the SunView window system is imtool. Image display under the MIT X window system is also available using the saoimage display server. This was developed for IRAF by SAO; distribution kits are available from the IRAF network archive. At the time that this was written new X11 based image display clients were being developed for or interfaced to IRAF by several sites. Eventually, there will be a range of image display clients to choose from and people will use the tool best suited to the type of data analysis they are doing.

Some interfaces for hardware image display devices are also available, although a general display interface is not yet included in the system. Only the IIS model 70 and 75 are current supported by NOAO. Interfaces for other devices are possible using the current datastream interface, which is based on the IIS model 70 datastream protocol with extensions for passing the WCS, image cursor readback, etc. (see the ZFIOGD driver in unix/gdev). This is how all the current displays, e.g., imtool and ximage, and the IIS devices, are interfaced, and there is no reason why other devices could not be interfaced to IRAF via the same interface. Eventually this prototype interface will be obsoleted and replaced by a more general interface.