The complete documentation is available as PDF or gzipped PostScript file.

Contents of the Document

1. Introduction: The Question of Standards
2. Catalogue Files & Directories
3. ReadMe file Contents
   1. Structure of the ReadMe file
   2. The Units
   3. The Labels
   4. Optional Ranges and Data Checking specifications:
      • specifying a range of allowed values
      • specifying NULL (unspecified) values
      • specifying the sort order
   5. Lengthy Notes and Texts
   6. Transformation to FITS
4. The cdsclient package
5. Selected Manual Pages
   • acut, a utility which helps to rearrange columns in a file
   • trcol, a shorter utility to just remove or transform columns in a file
   • anafile, the program which checks that the data conform to their description
   • tofits, a program which converts standardized files into FITS tables.
   The corresponding programs (for Unix-like platforms) can be downloaded as the two files acut.tar.gz for the programs acut and trcol anafile.tar.gz for the programs anafile and tofits.