Introduction

KAPPA is package of general-purpose astronomical image-processing and visualization commands. It is documented in SUN/95. Over the long history of the KAPPA package, many internal Fortran subroutines have been written to provide facilities within KAPPA which have subsequently proved to be of more-general use outside KAPPA. In order to gain the benefit of these internal KAPPA facilities, software developers have in the past taken copies of the relevant routines and included them in their own projects. The disadvantages of this are obvious--it is easy to end up with many, potentially different, copies of the same routines within a large software suite such as the Starlink Software Collection, and bug fixes need to be implemented in many different places, rather than a in single master copy.

Another way of using the internal KAPPA routines is to link your applications directly against the libraries in the KAPPA package, but this requires the KAPPA package to be installed anywhere where your software is to be built, which is not always convenient.

To get round these problems, the KAPLIBS package was created to contain the internal routines from KAPPA which are deemed to be ``generally useful''. Now, you only need to have KAPLIBS installed to build your software, not the much larger KAPPA.

There are a large number of routines in KAPLIBS, making it potentially difficult to find the routines you want. To ease this problem, a search tool is provided which allows the contents of this document to be searched (see here).