Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
Mind Boggling Problem with Map_Proj_Init
Folks, A couple of weeks ago I suspected an evil spirit had been set loose in the world to infect a colleague's computer. The long and short of it is this: Some of my map routines, which *always* work, were failing on her machine. She couldn't run any of my mapping software! Basically, any time she tried to put continental boundaries on top of an image, MAP_CONTINENTS reported "Map transform not established". Say what!? I *was* establishing a friggin' map transform with Map_Proj_Init in the line of code just BEFORE this line! So what gives here? mapStruct = Map_Proj_Init(...) Map_Continents, MAP_STRUCTURE=mapStruct, ... After several hours of putting great bald patches on my head by scratching the hair out, I finally discovered the problem. And then today the problem re-appears in the form of an e-mail from someone else. The unexplained convergence has prompted me to send a note to other unwitting souls who may find themselves in similar straights. Bottom line. Don't use the *old* Map_Continents routine you may have gotten from the rotten bastard who ran off with the department secretary to Tahiti. Or maybe, as today, you found in a copy of the ESRG IDL library you installed on your machine way back in 1986. Use a more modern one. Say, the one that came with your current IDL distribution. Things will go a LOT better for you. :-) You can find out which Map_Continents you are using by typing one or the other (or all!) of these IDL commands: IDL> Print, File_Which('map_continents.pro') IDL> .compile map_continents IDL> Help, /Source It should be the one that lives in an IDL lib directory! C:\Program Files\ITT\IDL\IDL80\lib\map_continents.pro Cheers, David -- David Fanning, Ph.D. Fanning Software Consulting, Inc. Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/ Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")