Greetings,

I have two questions about how ConvertDset converts surface NIML data to the GIFTI format.

1) When using GIFTI input and using the -o_niml_asc option, the node data (in SPARSE_DATA), is in ASCII format as expected, but the node indices (in INDEX_LIST) are presented as binary. Is this intended behaviour? Is it possible to store the node indices in ASCII format as well?

2) When using NIML input and using the -o_gii_asc option, the GIFTI DataArray elements with node data (equivalent to SPARSE_DATA in NIML) comes first; the last DataArray element contains the node indices (Intent="NIFTI_INTENT_NODE_INDEX"). This seems not according to the GIFTI standard [1], page 19, which reads:

"For storing a subset of node data, a DataArray with intent NIFTI_INTENT_NODE_INDEX may be used. In this case, the data array contains a list of node numbers and it should be the first data array in the file. The remaining data arrays in the file that contain data assigned to nodes must contain the same number of elements as the NIFTI_INTENT_NODE_INDEX array."

It seems that Convertdset's behaviour is not GIFTI-standard compliant. Is that correct, or am I missing something?

Thanks for your consideration, and I look forward to any answers that may enlighten me.

best,
Nick

[1] [www.nitrc.org]