IDL 8.2.3 released!

IDL 8.2.3 is now available for download from our website. It represents the latest work of the IDL development team, including new functionality in the areas of visualization and file access, as well as over 100 bugs fixed.

File Access

• New routines to provide read/write support for ZIP, GZIP and TAR archive formats:
  • FILE_GZIP / FILE_GUNZIP
  • FILE_ZIP (which I used to package the demo programs) / FILE_UNZIP
  • FILE_TAR / FILE_UNTAR
  • ZLIB_COMPRESS / ZLIB_UNCOMPRESS (in memory)
• New IDLffVideoRead class provides read capabilities for MP4, AVI, etc., movie files
• New READ_VIDEO, WRITE_VIDEO, QUERY_VIDEO procedural wrappers to IDLffVideoRead/IDLffVideoWrite

Visualization

• New BUBBLEPLOT and VOLUME functions
• (New) Graphics now provides output to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files
• Headless mode in (New) Graphics (i.e., setting BUFFER) doesn't require an X server
• Improvements to speed of overplotting in (New) Graphics
• IMAGE, CONTOUR and SURFACE functions now handle irregularly gridded data
• TEXT function can display an overline above a group of characters
• IDLgrAxis and the AXIS function have a SUBGRIDSTYLE property

Language

• New TERMINAL_SIZE function allows a user to get the number of columns and rows in IDL Workbench Console or IDL Command Line
• The LIST::ToArray method now has a DIMENSION keyword
• Added the imaginary number "i" to !CONST

Analysis

• INTERPOLATE now has a DOUBLE keyword to force output type to double precision

Workbench

• Eclipse upgrade to 3.7.2
• SVN connectors update: SVN Kit 1.7.8, which is compatible with SVN 1.7