[Nexus] Re: HDF BROWSER - hdfb

[Ben-Chin Cha]

Francesco De Carlo wrote:

>
> I thought HDF was directly supported by IDL.

Use IDL directly to extract HDF data is not a easy task for general IDL
users.

The HDFB relieves the user from how to use IDL to extract HDF data
and allows the user directly to address the HDF data with simple user
interface and with packaged graphics and analysis tools.

HDFB is a complete mouse driven IDL application, it accept any HDF/NEXUS
input file. It also provides the easy HDF/NEXUS file selection in a specific
directory. The primary goal is to let the user to extract the SDS
data easily and display data graphically. It packaged various IDL 1D/2D
graphic features and anaysis functions with extracted SDS data from
the input file. A user can easily generate data, plot, image files in
various IDL supported formats.

It also provides the flexiblility to extract multiple 1D or 2D
SDS data arrays to form a multi-1D or multi-2D array from a HDF/NEXUS
file.  The constructed multi-1D array is passed directly to PLOT1D,
and the multi-2D array is passed directly to IMAGE2D sub-programs.
(where PLOT1D is a general purpose multi-lines plotter, and IMAGE2D
is a general purpose multi-images 2D image viewer).

In summary, the HDFB program provides the IDL user with an easy to use
visualization tool for HDF/NEXUS 1D/2D/3D files.

>
> I have been using, since few years now, an HDF browser developed by
> Brian Tieman that supports general SDS HDF/Nexus data, allows browsing,
> plot etc., plus plays in sequence all hdf files found in a specific
> directory
> (this is very useful for tomography data). Brian program is written in
> Java and
> as far as I know is widely used. How your program compare to Brian's
> software ? And why should I choose one vs the other ?

Sorry, I am not the right person to answer this question.


Ben-chin