Coyote Library

["Jason P. Meyers" <jpm7934(at)cis.rit.edu>]

Hello All,

	This post obviously is targeted at Dave (Hi Dave!), but I thought it
was of significant interest to at least some of the readers of this NG
that it was worth it to post rather than just e-mailing Dave directly. 
Having said that, here goes:

	As most of us know, Dave Fanning has a rather extensive IDL website
which hosts many good example IDL programs.  I recently discovered that
some issues may cause problems for the unsuspecting.  Let me explain. 
Dave's "Example Programs" page
(http://www.dfanning.com/documents/programs.html) contains three links
to zip files containing different groupings of programs from the Coyote
library.  These three files are coyoteprograms.zip (website size:430KB
actual:399KB), coyotefiles.zip (website size:210KB actual:202KB), and
coyote2ndfiles.zip (website size:230KB actual:229KB).  Note: website
sizes refer to the advertised size on Dave's website and the actuals
refer to the size reported by Windows NT 4.0.

	Based on the info on the website, I was lead to believe that all of the
library files were in coyoteprograms.zip and that the book specific
files (i.e. all of the various versions needed as Dave takes you through
the learning process.) are in the other two zip files.  I was surprised
to find out that this is NOT the case.  For example, one program I use
on a daily basis (PWD.PRO) can only be found in the two book files and
not the "overall" library file.  Furthermore, I found some
incompatibilities between the files in the zip files too.  I recently
discovered this with Dave's recommendation to a recent post.  I tried
executing the following as recommended by Dave:

IDL> FSC_Window, 'TVImage', Indgen( 256, 256)

When I ran this command, IDL crashed and Dave's program gave some kind
of complaint about not finding a 24-bit color image.  I immediately (and
correctly) suspected the search path was not set up correctly for the
coyote libraries.  I had done the following kind of install of the
coyote libraries:

...\IDL\libs\coyote\first-edition
...\IDL\libs\coyote\second-edition
...\IDL\libs\coyote\full-library

where each zip was extracted to its own sub directory.  This works fine
because IDL is happy to search sub directories if told to do so. 
However, IDL was finding the files in
"...\IDL\libs\coyote\first-edition" before
"...\IDL\libs\coyote\full-library" because of alphabetical sorting
(speculation on my part).  I was able to solve the problem by explicitly
specifying the "...\IDL\libs\coyote\full-library" before all other
library directories in the IDL path.

Here are my questions for Dave which I think will be of general
interest:

1.  Is there a single zip file that contains all of the publicly
released "Coyote Library" files?  Purpose:  Ability to place all coyote
files in a single directory.

2.  If we get a negative response to #1, what is Dave's recommended
installation of the various coyote files which maximizes usability while
minimizing (or better yet eliminating) compatibility conflicts like the
one I mentioned above?

Finally, I would like to thank Dave yet once again for a great set of
programs.  I find my self using them without even knowing it.  For the
longest time, I thought that PWD was a built-in (or at least IDL
supplied .pro) command.  It wasn't until I tried to use it on our
school's Unix install that I realized it came from the coyote library!

Jason Meyers
PhD Student, Center for Imaging Science
Rochester Institute of Technology
jpm7934@rit.edu