Dear Ziad (et al),
SUMA surfaces in ASCII format take quite a lot of disc space, yet at the same time are very easy to read and write.
I wondered if it would be possible to add support for compressed .asc surface files. In analogy with BRIK files, these compressed surface files could then have the extension .asc.gz and would be compressed / decompressed on the fly automagically.
Compressing some surface files indicate that this would reduce disc usage by factor 2 to 4, depending on the size of the surface.
Thank you for your consideration.
cheers,
Nick