Resume

This library includes the IO and data type part of the
vista library originaly implemented by

Arthur Pope, University of British Columbia
Laboratory or Computational Intelligence

Further development was done by Gert Wollny, Marc Tittgemeyer,
and Heike Jähnike at the Max-Planck-Institute of Human
Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, and later by
Gert Wollny at the ETSI Telecomunicacion, UPM, Madrid, Spain.

Installation

Pre-packaged

• The library is available as libvistaio-dev/libvistaio14 from
  the official Debian archives.

• Ebuild for Gentoo Linux are available from the overlay gentoo-imaging
  (currently not availabe from layman)

  https://github.com/gerddie/gentoo-imaging

Compilation from source:

Requirements:

• cmake - http://www.cmake.org
• a POSIX compatible C compiler (GNU gcc will do just fine).

Then after unpacking the software to

vistaio-X.X.X one does: 
cd vistaio-X.X.X
mkdir build 
cd build 
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PATH=<prefix> 
make 
make test 
make install

The "make install" command you may have to run as root.
The tests cover only the 2d/3dfield loading and storing, and
the attribute IO.

Function naming remark

In order to avoid naming conflicts with other libraries that build
onm the same source code, all functions, types and macro names have
been changed from the name V. to VistaIO.. A python script to
autoatically apply such name schange to a source code tree is included
in the source code distribtuion.

just run it as

python vistaio_change_names.py

Note however, that it will replace all "V\w*", i.e. also those not
related to VistaIO.

The original vista library (converted to the automake build
system) is still available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mia/files/vista/2.1.7/

This implementation should be able to read all files that were
stored using the original library. If data is saved to one of the
original formats the original library should also be able to read
the files properly.

About endianess:

The vista file format was initially developed on a big-endian machine,
as a result Arthur Pope decided it is best to store the data in big-endian
format on the disk. Therefore, if you work on a low-endian machine (e.g.
all Intel & compatibles) all the data stored in the original formats is
converted during loading and storing. If, on the other hand you are loading
or storing to from or to one of the new formats, the data is written in
low-endian format, but on a big endian machine it will also be automatically
converted.