Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
Olaf Stetzer writes: > Even the itools developers > guide seems to be not very helpful here (I admit I had just a > short look through it though). Well, I've ground my way through it at least twice, and I've come to the conclusion that half of it must be missing. :-( On the other hand, I've been making pretty good progress with some of the things RSI has put into IDL explicitly for the iTools. The property sheet widgets will be fabulous (once I learn how to make them work right), and they have done wonderful things with tree widgets (all the browsers in iTools, for example). But I have found error handing and documentation to be...well, "basic" might be a nice way to put it. :-) And I *love* this syntax: IF ~ok THEN outahere Cheers, David P.S. Let's just say I'm thinking of doubling down on my bet that precious few of RSI's customers will have the wherewithal to make even modest changes to the supplied iTools. -- David W. Fanning, Ph.D. Fanning Software Consulting, Inc. Phone: 970-221-0438, E-mail: david@dfanning.com Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/ Toll-Free IDL Book Orders: 1-888-461-0155
David Fanning schrieb: > And I *love* this syntax: > > IF ~ok THEN outahere Then here is some similar kind of fun for the weekend :-) http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/verbose-c.html Olaf
On 9/12/03 4:56 AM, in article bjs1n0$j99$1@news.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de, "Olaf Stetzer" <olaf.stetzer@imk.fzk.de> wrote: > I understand, that the priority in creating the itools > was on interactive control, but it would be very nice > to control everything from IDL code as well. When I use IDL to generate figures for publication, I like to have an executable IDL routine (usually, a main program) that non-interactively generates a final figure. The routine is my 'audit trail' that guarantees that I can reproduce the figure exactly. If I need to change the figure later, I can isolate the parts of the routine that need to be modified. This is very different from, say, using Adobe Photoshop to twiddle with the contrast of an image, crop it on the fly, unsharp mask it so that it suits the eye, and save the final result, but not be able to regenerate the final image byte-for-byte because it is all done interactively without keeping detailed records of the quantitative processing done at each step. I hope that itools will make it possible to tweak an image interactively, but then to preserve all of the information necessary to regenerate the image from scratch using IDL code. Add my name to the list of people interested in learning how to do this. Dick French
"Richard G. French" <rfrench@wellesley.edu> writes: > > I hope that itools will make it possible to tweak an image interactively, > but then to preserve all of the information necessary to regenerate the > image from scratch using IDL code. Add my name to the list of people > interested in learning how to do this. Dick, your audit trail approach is exactly what I do as well. I attended RSI's IDL 6.0 presentation where I work, and many many other attendees were asking the same questions that you and I were. Namely: can I substitute other data into the same plot template? How do I track the history? Can I save it as a script? I did not see any demonstrated mechanism to export a script. The iTools format is an opaque binary format which is certainly not a script. The current answer from RSI was, "we can't do that now, but we're *real* keen on this for a future release!" (paraphrase) Alas, from what I saw, RSI would be focussing on the templating aspect, not the "audit trail." However, I think it is important for RSI to realize that if you can export the plot configuration, then that script *is* the template as well. I imagine that most of what the batch-processing people want is to tweak the format template interactively using iTools, export a script which has placeholders for the data, and then incorporate that script into their batch programs. Craig -- ------------------------------------------------------------ -------------- Craig B. Markwardt, Ph.D. EMAIL: craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu Astrophysics, IDL, Finance, Derivatives | Remove "net" for better response ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------