Enhancements to IRAF/STSDAS graphics

Abstract

The IRAF graphics kernel, psikern, is a true encapsulated PostScript implementation, an improvement over the former SGI-based PostScript output available from IRAF. The psikern kernel implements many more capabilities of gio/gki such as cell arrays (grayscale images), color, filled area patterns and true PostScript fonts. Several of the general-purpose graphics tasks in STSDAS such as igi, sgraph, skymap, and wcslab have been modified to use these capabilities explicitly. Other graphics tasks not enhanced explicitly can also make use of new capabilities such as PostScript font support. We present an overview of psikern and several examples of output created by the enhanced STSDAS tasks.