TABLES V3.4 RELEASE SUMMARY                     4-Nov-2005

[These notes are identical to the full release notes due to the small number of
changes.]

General
========
    Install version 2.51 of CFITSIO for use with Tables.  One reason for
    this update is that compiling on Mac OS-X Tiger gave errors having to
    do with the use of the macro definition OFF_T.  This macro definition
    has been improved in version 2.51.

TABLES.TTOOLS
=============
    - TBTABLES
    Although FITS tables are machine independent, STSDAS tables are not.  The
    function to open a table has been modified to test whether the table is
    byte-swapped, and if so, to issue a more informative error message than
    just that the table couldn't be opened.

    - TCREATE
    When running eparam, users frequently delete a string value by entering
    a blank instead of "".  tcreate was not correctly interpreting a blank
    value the same as a null string, however, which resulted in spurious
    error messages about a missing file.

    -- STRFITS
    There were (deliberate) calling sequence mismatches in a function that
    read data from a FITS table into a buffer and then interpreted the data
    in the buffer depending on the data types of the table columns.  Newer
    compilers complained about the calling sequence mismatches, so the code
    was revised to work around this.

    - STWFITS
    Complex data are still not really handled correctly (the imaginary part
    is ignored), but a bug in the application of BSCALE and BZERO to complex
    data has been fixed.

    - TSORT
    A bug has been fixed having to do with sorting large FITS tables.
    Descriptors for columns in the original table were being used for a
    temporary table, and this resulted in the table being sorted incorrectly.
    The task did not detect the problem and therefore did not issue any
    warning or error message.  Smaller FITS tables, STSDAS tables, and text
    tables were not affected by this bug.


Parameter file changes
======================
No changes to parameter files were made for any task in the TABLES package,
except for the version parameter.