A great blog I read regularly “answers” search queries with funny answers and (as usual for them) drawings on a dry erase board. I’m going to start doing the same thing, without the funny answer or drawings.

idl list — IDL added lists (and hash tables) in IDL 8.0. If you don’t have IDL 8, check out my implementation which I was using before IDL 8 (IDLdoc still uses it). There’s also a hash table implementation and some other collections.

idl 8.3 — Yes, IDL 8.3 came out in December.

mpi idl — I am the product manager for FastDL, a suite of parallel computing tools which includes a library of MPI bindings for IDL.

idl flow visualization — I hope you found this overview. I also have some IDL code to implement LIC (line integral convolution) visualization.

sublime text idl syntax — I’m not sure, but I have heard that Sublime extensions are similar to TextMate bundles. I have a TextMate bundle for IDL.

latex in idl — Historically there have been multiple ways of inputing LaTeX into IDL graphics, but there is a nice way built into IDL:

IDL> print, tex2idl('$e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$') e!Ui!Mp!N + 1 = 0
IDL> xyouts, 0.5, 0.5, tex2idl('$e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$'), /normal, charsize=3, font=1

This should produce something like:

This same notation can be used in IDL’s function graphics routines:

IDL> p = plot(findgen(11), title='Title is $e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$')

“idl -e” option — There is an -e option to the IDL command line which executes a string as an IDL command:

$ idl -e "print, 'Hello'"
IDL Version 8.3, Mac OS X (darwin x86_64 m64).
(c) 2013, Exelis Visual Information Solutions, Inc.
Hello