FITSIO - ANSI C version now available

[William Pence]

  Announcing CFITSIO, an ANSI C Version of the FITSIO Library
  -----------------------------------------------------------

A beta release of the FITSIO software library, written entirely in ANSI
C, is now available for general use.  The routines in this CFITSIO
library provide a portable interface for reading and writing any type
of FITS format data file.  These C routines are closely modelled after
the Fortran subroutines in the original FITSIO library and provide all
the same functionality.

Because this is a beta release, the documentation is still somewhat
limited.  Please refer to the README file in the release for
information on building and using the library.   Use of the CFITSIO
library is also illustrated in a sample program called cookbook.c which
performs a series of typical operations on some test FITS files.

This version of CFITSIO has been extensively tested, but every single
routine and every possible option have not been tried.  Programmers
should be cautious about using this library for critical work until
after the full CFITSIO release later this spring.  Please report any
problems or suggestions for improvement to the author at the address
given below.

Both the new CFITSIO (ANSI C) and the older FITSIO (Fortran-77)
software may be obtained over the WWW from:

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/fitsio/fitsio.html

Alternatively, this software may be obtained via anonymous ftp at:
legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov in the software/fitsio/c/ or
software/fitsio/fortran/ directories.

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William Pence
High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
NASA/GSFC
e-mail: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
phone: (301)286-4599