Specx 7.0.2 is now available for download from www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~rachael/specx. This version installs and runs on all versions of Windows, but is not yet available for other platforms. I hope that a linux port will follow relatively quickly, once I have tidied up a few things that don't yet comply with the Fortran standards.

Although users should find the look and feel quite familiar, the new version is a complete rewrite, with lots of new features. The main differences are in the use of new dynamic data structures, to remove the artificial limits on such things as length of spectra, number of subbands, size of the stack etc, and a considerable extension of the SCL scripting language, with proper procedures (which include facilities for passing and returning arguments) and additional control constructs (labels, go-tos and a "break" command). Multi-dimensional arrays and functions are also supported. Other significant new features include:

• The ability to plot in multiple windows, and panes within windows.
• A greater range of plot options, including scatter plots and error-bars.
• A facility for automatically re-gridding two spectra to a common sampling before adding or averaging them (so that you could build up a spectral-line survey simply by repeated averaging, for example).
• A range of commands for creating and annotating plots (adding titles, arrows etc, and plotting arrays as line plots or images).
• Much more versatile mapping, which can easily accommodate large volumes of irregularly-gridded data.
• Integration of grid-map with other mapping plot types, and the addition of a simple "movie" facility in "channel-map".
• A "Select" command to select a subset of the spectra in a file or map for further processing.
• Better handling of spectral-axis units.
• A significant speed increase, by a factor of 50 or so in the command language, and a factor of 5 to 10 in the reduction operations.
• Improved error handling, and html documentation.

The "splash screen" from the new version is shown below, illustrating several of these new features.

Specx7 is based on three portable subroutine libraries: Fitsio, for all file handling; Pat Wallace's SLALIB for astrometric functions, and Tim Pearson's PGPLOT for graphics (with a Windows driver written by Charles McLachlan at MRAO). In particular, all files (data, map and dump) use a version of FITS binary tables, and are portable between platforms. I have also used Remo Tilanus's C version of the GSD library, but have emulated the few Starlink utility routines used within that, rather than attempt to port the whole slew of Starlink libraries.

Of course, I recognize that the "Windows-only" restriction at the moment might make this unattractive to some. But if you would prefer to work in a Windows environment anyway, or don't usually use Specx native file format much, then you will probably benefit by making the change.

While the current version (7.0.2) is still really a "beta", I have been testing it pretty hard using real-life data (including a map containing 70000 spectra), and it appears to work pretty well. It would really be helpful at this stage, however, if other people would try it out and then send me feedback. At this stage I am concentrating on ensuring that the release is complete (i.e. has all the functionality of v6.7) and is as bug-free as possible. I have lots of ideas for new features, but those not already included, will probably have to wait until v7.1 at this point.

Click here for printable version.