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Functional Table Reader

Revision History

February 28, 2000	Original reslease of my Functional Table Reader application.
April 14, 2000	Added the ability to read and write the NASA 2, 3, or 4 argument table file format.
December 3, 2000	Fixed a bug with reading table names that included an "_" character (among other non-alphabetic characters). Added custom icons to the Mac and Windows applications. All files saved from the Mac version are now identified as TEXT files.
December 19, 2000	Fixed a bug with reading CSV file comments.
January 3, 2001	Added basic table plotting capability.
January 10, 2001	Picked up latest version of Plot2D package.
February 1, 2001	Tables are now written out in the same order they are read in.
February 15, 2001	Fixed a problem with the display of the scroll bars when more than 9 tables are loaded.
May 16, 2001	Fixed two errors in writing NASA format table files.
November 24, 2001	Added support for MacOS X application bundles.
May 27, 2002, version 1.2.1	Added support for ART FlightLab SAV files. Picked up new version of plotting library that fixes a bug with plotting one-dimensional tables.
August 10, 2002, version 1.2.2	Learned that FlightLab Fuselage 2D uniform tables can come in any order in the SAV file. Modified the SAV file reader to reflect this reality. Removed the Swing file chooser that was being used and replaced it with the old AWT file chooser. It works for this application and looks better and is better behaved on most platforms -- especially MacOS X.
August 12, 2002, version 1.2.3	Fixed a serious bug introduced in Version 1.2.2 that caused the program to ignore the name of the file to save tables to provided by the user (it would just overwrite the file last opened).
September 8, 2002, version 1.2.4	Fixed a bug in reading FlightLab Airfoil SAV files that was introduced in version 1.2.2.
October 25, 2002 Version 1.3.0	Added ability to view tables in tabular form and copy table contents to the clipboard for pasting into a spreadsheet like Excel. Fixed a bug with writing out CSV files where a comma was added, incorrectly, to numbers greater than 1000. Made the program more MacOS X friendly (about box, better menu integration, etc). Program now covered by the GNU GPL rather than being public domain. Source code versions prior to 1.2.4 remain in the public domain or covered by LGPL as stated at the top of each source file.
November 16, 2002 Ver. 1.3.1	Added the ability to read C81 airfoil aero table files. I do not plan on adding the ability to write C81 format files unless someone requests it.
June 18, 2004 Ver. 1.4.0	Installer will now work with Windows XP. New pluggable architecture makes adding new table readers/writers easy. Started using a new library that improves MacOS X integration. As a side-effect, the application on any platform has a "Windows" menu that can be used to navigate between all open windows. Dropped support for the "tblz" file format. If you have any files in this format, they will need to be converted to an ASCII format such as FDA before upgrading to this version.
May 3, 2005 Ver. 1.4.1	Increased the number of fraction digits in FDA output files from 4 to 5. Fixed a problem with the frameless menu bar on MacOS X.
February 17, 2008 Ver. 1.5.0	Added a completely new plotting package which allows interactive axis scaling (by dragging the mouse in the plot area), printing of plots and saving plots to a PNG file. Also added the ability to cross-plot data on tables with more than one independent variable. Added support for reading, but not writing, OTIS table files. The project build process is now Apache Ant based.
December 14, 2008 Ver. 1.6.0	Added support for reading and writing POST table files.
January 4, 2009, Ver. 1.7.0	Added support for saving plotted tables as Scaled Vector Graphics (SVG) files using the Apache Batik library. Corrected a bug with reading POST tables with zero dimensions (zero dimension tables--constants--are now ignored). Added support for reading and writing POST tables with 3 independent variables.
May 9, 2009, Ver. 1.8.0	Completely rewrote the table manipulation library from scratch. This was done to support another project, but the results of that effort are being published here. The new library uses JScience and, other than the FTableReader instances, is realtime safe. Other changes: Tables can now be written out in OTIS table format, and a simple ability to read the output from S/HABP has been added, but it is extremely limited in what it can handle.
September 7, 2009, Ver. 1.9.0	Added initial support for reading and writing POST II format table files.
September 11, 2009, Ver. 1.9.2	Fixed numerous bugs with reading POST and POST II table files.
November 7, 2010, Ver. 1.10.0	Added the ability to run TableReader from a UNIX/DOS command line environment. Fixed a bug where removing tables from the table list would not actually remove them, causing much confusion. Modified plot renderer to always show plot symbols. Added the ability to display an optional cubic spline on mono-varient tables. OTIS tables that use "!" as a comment delimiter can now be read. Added a new, more modern, application icon.
April 14, 2012, Ver. 1.11.0	Added support for reading and writing Dynetics Aero Table format files. Modified to parse "NaN" as a number from most table formats (not tested on all readers). Improved robustness of the CSV file reader. Improved OTIS table file parsing to handle tables that have a direct variable multiplier (it is ignored) and have curve fit degree specified (it is ignored).
June 30, 2012, Ver. 1.11.2	Fixed a bug that prevented the reading of POST3D tables that start with "p$tab" rather than just "$tab". Dynetics tables are now written out with two spaces for delimiters rather than a tab character. The "END" is now omitted when writing out an OTIS file.
October 27, 2013, Ver. 1.12.0	Modified the POST3D table reader to try and be more robust. Corrected CSV reader to never use commas as decimal separators no matter the user's locale. Changed the OTIS table file comment character to "!" and output tables are now always set to be linearly interpolated. Added support for using drag-and-drop to open files (just drag the file onto the main window's table list area).
November 2, 2013, Ver. 1.13.0	Improved OTIS table reader so that it maintains information about the degree of the curve fits in the tables between reading in and writing out an OTIS table file. Added information on the number of breakpoints in each dimension to the main window's table list display. Added the ability to enter an "undefined value" that, if it occurs in the table, will not be plotted. Minor corrections to messages displayed.
November 27, 2013, Ver. 1.13.1	Corrected an error with writing OTIS table files that would result in illegal table or independent variable names in some circumstances. Also corrected an error with reading multiple tables from a single OTIS table file.
April 27, 2014, Ver. 1.13.2	Fixed a threading issue that could cause the program to randomly freeze up on some systems (especially Windows). Updated to the latest version of JFreeChart (1.0.17). The program now requires Java 1.6 (Java 6) or later.
January 11, 2015, Ver. 1.13.3	Changed default OTIS file extension from "dat" to "itd". Fixed a bug that prevented the program from running with newer versions of Java on MacOS X. Removed some use of deprecated code. Cleaned up code formatting and documentation.
March 15, 2017, Ver. 1.13.4	Fixed OTISTableReader to ignore anything after the 30th column in most of the table header lines. Some users were putting comments out there. Modified CVSTableReader to not write out blank lines in the header but instead to write out a single comma. Recent versions of Excel simply skip the blank lines messing up the format completely. Fixed a long-standing bug with the Windows menu getting out of synch with the open windows. Improved an error message output from POST2TableReader to better explain what really happened. Modernized code to use more features of recent versions of Java. Cleaned up and reformatted. The program now requires Java 1.8 (Java 8) or later
October 23, 2018, Ver. 1.13.5	Fixed the POST2 table reader to always reserve the first column of the output file for comment characters. All data is indented by at least one space/column.
October 9, 2020, Ver. 1.13.6	Fixed a bug with an underlying library (MRJAdapter) that wasn't compatible with recent versions of Java (Java 15 in particular).
January 15, 2024, Ver. 1.13.7	Program now requires Java 11 or later Modified to remove the seriously out of date MRJAdapter and Bare Bones Browser Launcher libraries and replaced them with the now standard java.awt.Desktop class. Modified MacOS application bundle to work better on modern versions of MacOS. The MacOS version has a Java 11 compatible JRE bundled with the application (you do not need to have Java installed to run this version). Removed obsolete Dynetics table format reader.