Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:51:06 -0700 (MST)
From: Steve Larson <slarson@pirlmail.lpl.Arizona.EDU>
To: SHOWALTER@ringside.arc.nasa.gov
Subject: PDS RPX evaluation

Mark-
	I think the documentation and layout of the RPX PDS discs
is excellent. I had some initial problems with permissions when
copying to disc, but they were local problems that were fixed.
Below are more specific comments. 

	I looked at the RPX PDS discs with two systems:

A. Sun Ultra running the current rev. of Solaris looking at GIF
and FITS images with XV, FITS images with the current rev.of IRAF,
pdf files with acrobat reader 4.0 and postscript files with ghostview
and a level 1 printer.

B. IBM Thinkpad 600 on the Windoze 98 side (I have not yet installed
IRAF on the Linux side) looking at pdf files with Acrobat 2.1 (or
trying to) and GIF images with MS Internet Explorer.

	Here are my comments on the contents of the discs in order of
use;
	
1. aareadme.txt (maybe aareadfirst.txt might be more explicit) This
is well laid out and the obvious entry point for new users of this
data. The discussions of file formats, file naming, and directory
structure looks complete. It is sufficiently well done that I did not
have any problem finding my way around (therefore it MUST be good!).

2. errata.txt, voldesc.cat - useful for volume-specific information.

3. document/tutorial.txt - good second level user information describing
data sets, goals from the proposal abstracts (and therefore what to expect)
and additional details defining file types, labels, and pointers to 
documents on filters, etc. Had no trouble reading files on the Sun, but
the Acrobat reader 2.1 on the Thinkpad could not read pdf files (I
suspect this is a problem with Acrobat, but will have to look into this
further to know.)

4. The primary text files in the subdirectories were all helpful in
describing the other files in their directories. The directories calib,
catalog, geometry, index, label and software were all useful. I have not
had time to test any of the SPICE data in geometry, but it looks pretty
complete.

5. The data files. I had no problem looking at the browse gif files and
labels. Spot checks indicate that the labels looked consistent with the
images. The calibrated images could be looked at with XV (in its limited
way), but I had to use the IRAF task rfits to copy them to disc in IRAF
format. IRAF would not display the images directly from the CD. The
compressed raw files could be unzipped to disc from the destination
directory.

	So, except for the awkwardness of having to rfits images from
cd in IRAF, things seemed to work. I would be interested in what others
found.

Cheers,
	-Steve