No SDF file format?

I see probably a 100 of supported formats but no SDF one. Any reason for that? Dead format? MATLAB, Python, IDL support it…

My wild guess (and it is only a guess) is that either no one has written a reader yet, or the file format is not available or there are legal restrictions on the file format. As always with an open source project, feel free to create a reader and contribute to the community.

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For anyone curious about the format, here are some links:

Interesting robotics-related open format.

So the “no one has written a reader yet” seems to be the right assumption here :slight_smile:

We welcome it gladly @DanRR .

Adding to confusion why it is not supported, here could be two not the same SDF formats. One called SDFormat and another Self Describing File. This is what i find was written in the PIC code EPOCH description (one of the well known codes in the field) which uses SDF file format
" Output in EPOCH is handled using the custom designed SDF file format (Self Describing Format ). A detailed specification of this format is available elsewhere, although this is only of interest to developers wishing to write new libraries. EPOCH comes with readers for ITT IDL, LLNL VisIt, Mathworks MatLab and Python. The IDL reader is also compatible with the open source GDL tool."

Problem here is that often (or better say almost always) libraries written by EPOCH team are not easy to make compatible with versions of graphics visualizers. For example there is no version of readers for Visit for Windows or no Visit for latest Linux Ubuntu 22 which people mostly use because Visit just can not make one for last several years (compilation of Visit for example may typically take ridiculous time almost one day and then fails :slight_smile: )

So this is another format ? Do you have a link to a spec somewhere ?

Yes, i just got the answer from EPOCH. In TEX form it is here

Thats a latex file, do they have a compiled .pdf somewhere ?

That was the response from the code developers, but not exactly those who were working to implement this format there. Afraid, getting more info may take some time.

No worries I was just curious.

Here is the link on EPOCH Developers manual, where starting from Page 93 one can find more info about SDF:

https://github.com/Warwick-Plasma/EPOCH_manuals/releases/download/v4.17.0/epoch_dev.pdf

@DanRR it looks like Epoch developers went with VisIt. It is also not supported out of the box so you need to compile a plugin that is bundled with the source. They describe it here.

I am on a project currently, which is considering doing Epoch1D in situ for large ensembles, so I am looking into a viability of writing a reader or a direct Catalyst adapter.