New IDL (OSIA) - ISAP Interface

ISAP 2.0 and higher provides a routine LINK_ISAP, which allows to link ISAP to any IDL session (e.g. OSIA). If you want to link ISAP within an existing IDL session simply copy the file link_isap.pro to your current directory (or any directory in your IDL path), and edit the line which defines the path to the top ISAP directory. Then execute the file like

IDL> @link_unix

You can also copy this line to your IDL startup file. This will give you full command line access to all ISAP routines. To start the ISAP GUI simply type,

IDL>start_gui

If you have been working on an AAR in your IDL session, e.g. if you have produced it within the OSIA environment, you can pass this aar directly to the GUI:

OSIA> ...
OSIA> NGC1068 = aar
OSIA> start_gui,aar_in=NGC1068

In this example the name of the aar inside the GUI will be "NGC1068". Vice versa, the GUI - on exit - now passes an AAR back to the command line. To retrieve this aar type

IDL> aar_out=gui_output()

after you have exited the GUI.

For historical reasons there is a slight inconsistency between SWS AARs in OSIA and ISAP: the two data tags SPARE and RPID are byte arrays in OSIA, but integers in ISAP. Should this ever cause problems in your application you can use the ISAP routine aar_fix to transform the AAR from one representation to the other:

OSIA> isap_aar = aar_fix(osia_aar) ; (the mode 'ia2isap' is default)
OSIA> ...
OSIA> new_osia_aar = aar_fix(isap_aar,mode='isap2ia')