[fitsbits] Fwd: Re: Storing PDF and other graphics binary files in FITS {External} {External}

[jaffe]

In reply mostly to Bill's comment:my intent is to simplify my users' 
lives by putting everything they need in one file and supplying the 
meta-data they also need in a recognized format in the extension-header 
to the graphics.

The PDF bytestream (or equivalently JPG or TIFF etc) is produced by in 
my case by the same Python code that generated the binary OI-FITS 
tables.

The user would need an app to extract the bytestream from the FITS 
extension and feed it to a PDF viewer.

At the crudest level this could indeed be just a generic "byte-dump" 
extension that just moves data from FITS files into/outof external files 
but provides headers for metadata.

Along the lines of Lucio's comments it would be trivial to write an app 
that reads the extension header, recognizes the graphics format, and 
feeds the data via a pipe or similar mechanism into the appropriate 
viewer.

Thanks for your comments.
Walter

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [fitsbits] Storing PDF and other graphics binary files in 
FITS {External}
Date: 2026-03-15 18:37
 From: William Pence via fitsbits <fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu>
To: jaffe <jaffe at strw.leidenuniv.nl>
Cc: Fitsbits <fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu>
Reply-To: William Pence <wdpence2000 at yahoo.com>

How would one view the PDF file if it is imbedded inside a FITS binary 
table?  Would users find it more convenient to distribute ancillary data 
like this as separate files where they can be directly accessed 
alongside the primary FITS file.

Bill

> On Mar 15, 2026, at 12:26 PM, jaffe via fitsbits 
> <fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu> wrote:
> 
> For an interferometric application I am storing the binary data in the 
> so-called OI-FITS convention of FITS.  But on the side I am generating 
> rather complicated graphics files for my users, in this case in PDF.  I 
> would like to store the .pdf file as a table in the same FITS file.  Is 
> there a conventional way of doing this?  I could create a 1 row binary 
> table with the entire PDF file as the single column, but this could be 
> several megabytes and might bother some reading or writing routines.
> 
> Is there any need to create a "GRAPHICS" extension to FITS?
> 
> Walter
> 
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