[MINC-users] mincreshape -dimsize

[Peter Neelin]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Andrew Janke <a.janke at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 22 September 2015 at 01:41, Robert D. Vincent
> <robert.d.vincent at mcgill.ca> wrote:
> > Historically, I believe mincreshape really was only meant to resize the
> two
> > fastest-varying dimensions (xspace and yspace in this case), at least
> > according to the man page.
>
> Correct, the original reason was due to slice scaling IIRC. If Peter
> is still lurking he'll know the answer.
>

I created the image-conversion-variable interface (ICV functions) to allow
existing programs (in 1992) to be easily modified to load minc images.
These programs (written by various people, most notably Alan) had a very
restricted concept of images and they needed to be able to load the more
general minc format images so the ICV layer would massage the images into a
suitable type, range, size, orientation, etc. The requirement was only for
2D images, but I generalized the capability to support more dimensions if
desired.

Mincreshape was originally only intended to allow extraction of hyperslabs
from a minc volume. However, it occurred to me that it might also be
convenient to expose the ICV functionality at the command-line - cheap to
implement and useful for data manipulations - so I threw all of those
options in as well. This has led to the confusing mess of options and
behaviours that I have left to you all.


> As you rightly point out, this is not all that amenable to new users!
>

Indeed! My deepest apologies.

Lesson: no new feature is ever cheap, especially when the software has a
lifetime approaching 25 years!

Peter
-- 
Peter Neelin
(peter.neelin at gmail.com)