Client Display Library--CDL

A new library is now available that will allow C or Fortran host programs to display a image or do overlay graphics using image servers such as Ximtool , SAOtng , and SAOimage . The Client Display Library (CDL) provides all the functionality found in standard IRAF tasks such as display and tvmark in a form which can be used by any host program. It may be used from IMFORT programs or can be used by any application needing to display or mark images. Features include:

Image Display:

• Connections on sockets or fifos
• Hi-level display of IRAF, FITS or arbitrary rasters of any datatype
• Cursor readback
• Subraster image I/O
• Automatic Z-scaling of images (as used in the display task)
• Automatic frame buffer selection option
• Hardcopy from the client

Overlay Graphics - Marker Primitives:

• Point (10 basic types providing dozens of combinations)
• Line (6 styles)
• Box (fill optional)
• Circle (fill optional)
• Circular Annuli
• Polyline
• Polygon (fill optional)
• Ellipse (arbitrary size and rotation)
• Elliptical Annuli (arbitrary size and rotation)
• Text (arbitrary size and rotation)
• Allows erasure of markers

Newly added features:

• 6 line styles
• 5 font choices, include sub/superscripting and in-line changes
• SPP bindings
• ANSI C prototypes
• memory optimizations

The CDL runs on all supported Unix platforms with any of the currently used image display servers and includes full documentation and sample tasks in both C and Fortran.

The CDL and a readme is available as a compressed tar file of sources from

• ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/x11iraf/cdl.readme
• ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/x11iraf/cdl.tar.Z
• ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/x11iraf/cdl.tar.gz

It will also be available from the IRAF mirror sites discussed elsewhere in this Newsletter. Additional work is planned to enhance the interface and user suggestions are always welcome.

This software was developed under the Open IRAF initiative which is funded by the NASA Astrophysics Data Program (ADP).

Mike Fitzpatrick