Releases to date have been as follows:
tabular
environment now available.compress
now work
(as well as gzip and bzip2).-demo
starts up with demo data.-disk
" flag allows use of disk backing storage for
large tablesIn addition, the following incompatibilities and changes have been introduced since the last version:
-f
" flag). FITS files and VOTables can
still be identified automatically (i.e. it's not necessary to
specify format in this case) but ASCII tables cannot:
you must now specify the format when loading ASCII tables.
This change allows better error messages and support for
more text-like formats.jel.classes
"
and "jel.classes.activation
",
not "gnu.jel.static.classes
".Secondly, the provision of load dialogues has been modularised, and a number of new dialogues provided. The new ones are:
startable.load.dialogs
system property.
The appearance of the Load Window has changed; now only the File Browser button is visible along with the Location field in the body of the window, but the DataSources menu can be used to display other available table import dialogues.
topcat-full.jar
and topcat-lite.jar
.
The former is much larger than before (11 Mbyte),
since it contains a number
of classes to support custom load dialogues such as the MySpace
browser and web service interaction, as well as the SoG classes.
The latter contains only the classes for the core functionality,
and is much smaller (3 Mbyte).
topcat -help
is now more comprehensive,
describing briefly what each option does and listing system
properties as well as arguments/flags proper.
In addition, the save dialogue now displays the current row subset and sort order - this makes it easier to see and/or change the details of the table you're about to save.
exec
functions which execute commands on the local
operating system-verbose
(or -v
)
flag one or more times you can get those messages back.
The messages (in fact all logging messages at any level)
can also be viewed from the GUI by using the new
File|Show Log menu option from the
Control Window.
tablecopy
tool is no longer covered in this
document; it is replaced by the tcopy
tool in
the separate
STILTS package.
There has also been some reorganisation of this document, mainly
in the appendices.
-version
flagNULL_
test on the first column of a table.Times
class.RANDOM
special function.null
" interpreted as a blank value in ASCII
tables.roundDecimal
and formatDecimal
functions
introduced for more control over visual appearance of numeric values.Some non graphics-related improvements have also been made as follows:
-soap
flag on the command line. This facility may be withdrawn in
future versions, in view of the fact that the PLASTIC service
can provide similar functionality.
showObjects
message,
it now checks if a matching subset exists rather than always
creating and adding a new one. If it does, it just sets current
the existing one. This can cut down (a bit) on proliferation
of Row Subsets.file:
scheme sent by TOPCAT in
PLASTIC messages now correctly conform to RFC 1738.-Dmyspace.cache=true
to speed it up at the
expense of accuracy.
ivo://votech.org/votable/highlightObject
message,
see Section 8.2 and Section 8.3.csv-noheader
output format.votable-fits-href
and
votable-binary-href
format tables from the file
browser.mark.workaround
system property,
see Section 9.2.3.startable.storage
policy "sideways
")
have been introduced.
These can provide considerable efficiency improvements for
certain tasks when working with very large (and especially wide)
tables.
ivo:
or myspace:
URLs is now provided - see new Section 4.2.toHex
and fromHex
numeric
conversion functions.-J
flag to topcat
startup script
for passing flags directly to Java.ivo://votech.org/votable/loadFromURL
message.