
NCSA Height-Color Visualizer Binaries
May 1990
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
-----------------------------------------------

In this directory you will find some useful utilities to use
in conjunction with NCSA Height-Color Visualizer.  An explanation
of each follows:

df_dspl
-------
Displays HDF 8-bit raster, HDF 24-bit raster, and 2D HDF floating point 
scientific data on the IRIS screen as image data.

hcvis
-----
The executable for NCSA Height-Color Visualizer.

iristohdf
---------
Converts images stored in SGI 'libimage.a' format into NCSA
HDF format.  Works with 8-bit lut images and 24-bit true color
images, but not with greater than 8-bit lut images.

paload
------
Loads a color palette which can be displayed with 'palshow'.
Only 8-bit color palettes are supported with entries stored
physically in SGI IRIS lut locations 512-767.  Palette files
have a '.hpal' suffix.  Alternately, if a '.hdf' image file
is given as the argument, paload will pull out the color palette
if present.  Program works incorrectly with 24-bit images (this is
not a bug).

palshow
-------
Displays the current palette used by 'hcvis' or 'paload'.

paltohdf
--------
Converts a raw binary format of 256 bytes of red followed by 256
bytes of green followed by 256 bytes of blue into an HDF readable
palette file.  Input filesize is thus 768 bytes where the above bytes
are unsigned chars in the range [0..255].

rtobw
-------
Converts an HDF color 8-bit or 24-bit raster file into equivalent black 
and white HDF 8-bit raster file with local gray color palette.  Uses the
30% Red, 59% Green, 11% Blue formula.

r24tor8
-------
Converts an HDF 24-bit raster file into a compressed HDF 8-bit
raster file.  Compression algorithm is an advanced technique
(i.e. better than 3-3-2) with very good results.

ranlib
------
A script to duplicate the function of 'ranlib' since SGI's
UNIX System V doesn't have this command.

The source code for many of these programs is in the directory
'hcvis_util'.

