Hello AFNI experts,

I'm using Matlab to analyze data on the surface, and would like to view the results in SUMA. So far, I'm reading and writing .1D and that works fine; however this fileformat seems 'dumb', in the sense that no meta-information about the data is stored (column labels, information about stats), which becomes confusing for me when dealing with more than seven plus or minus two columns.

Playing around with 3dVol2Surf, I found that the .niml files *do* store this information (COLMS_LABS,COLMS_TYPE,COLMS_STATSYM,HISTORY_NOTE,etc). And AFNI_NIML_TEXT_DATA=YES sets the output format to easily readable ASCII for both data and meta-information. Based on this I concluded that saving my data as .niml files is the way forward.

Before I start and try to implement matlab functions for reading and writing niml files, I would like to ask
- is it correct that .1D files do not support meta-information that SUMA can display?
- is there currently any matlab support for reading/writing niml files that I have missed?
- if not, is there a specification of the niml format that goes beyond [1] and specifies which meta-information fields exist and their meaning (similar to [2] about the .HEAD file)? This may not be crucial, but it may come in handy.

Other question: is there any way that suma can display more than one column of column labels when there are many, similar to afni? My screen is to small to show 70 labels.

thanks a lot,

Nick

[1] [afni.nimh.nih.gov]
[2] [afni.nimh.nih.gov]