#342 SDDS data file support
SDDS, or Self Describing Data Sets, is a way of storing and working with data that was developed at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) for use in the simulation and operation of accelerators. Because SDDS is very generic in nature, it can be used for processing and displaying data from essentially any source.
It allows to access data by calling the name of the column, moreover it supports binary conversion to compress data. It has some tools to plot but they very limited compared to gnuplot. At the moment the fastest way to use SDDS with gnuplot is converting data to ascii manually, but It would be very nice if gnuplot will support this standard natively with the example sintax:
plot "file.sdds" using xdata:ydata ...
I may start this task personally but I need to be taught some gnuplot code :)
It sounds like SDDS might be similar to EDF (ESRF Data Format)? You might be able to use the existing EDF code as a model. The bulk of the implementation code is in the file .../src/breaders.c. From the gnuplot command line, it is indicated by saying
plot <datafile name> binary filetype=edf
Is that enough to get you started?