trouble adding new image reader/lousy documentation

[Lawrence M. Lifshitz]

hi. I am a newbie to vtk, attempting to add a trivial image
reader to it.  I've got an ascii header of fixed size and
format to parse, yielding image dimensions, etc, followed
by short ints of 3d data.  I am using the doxygen documentation
(which is very nice as far as it goes) and the VTK Toolkit
2nd edition as my references. I have vtk 3.1, under windows.

My big problem is it is not clear at all to me 
WHICH METHODS I MUST OVERRIDE AND WHICH I DON'T HAVE TO.
In addition, it
is still hard to find descriptions of many methods.  It is not
clear what my reader must produce in the end (what class variables
must it set, etc)?


I assumed that I should take one of the readers (eg, BMP) and
use it as a starting point for modification.  Let's see. How does
it read the file? I notice vtkBMPreader calls OpenAndSeekFile.  
Using doxygen
I quickly go to vtkImageReader, since it is the first class which
has this routine. But there is absolutely no description of what
it does.  Am I missing something?  am I supposed to dive into
the code to figure this out?  Same comment goes for many of the
other routines.

I am new to vtk and fairly new to C++, but I've spent over two weeks on
it and still have zip to show for it, and a very confused mental image
of how most things fit together (I've read the whole book).  I must say,
inside of a day I was using OpenInventor and had a very clear concept
of how to fit parts together. Does the user's guide make any of this
clearer?

It looks like it should be a great tool, but I'm very frustrated
(in case you can't tell :)).

        Larry



-- 
Lawrence M. Lifshitz, Ph.D.	    
Biomedical Imaging Group - University of Massachusetts Medical School
Phone: (508) 856-3392  	   email:    Lawrence.Lifshitz at umassmed.edu
FAX: (508) 856-1840	   web:	     http://invitro.umassmed.edu/~lml
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