.wid

.wid format for saving a single ring width sequence

A .wid format file consists of ring widths written as a column of successive rings with the width of the youngest ring at the top of the document. This plain format without meta data was used by the dendrochronologist Lars Löfstrand in 1995 with files saved either with the extension .dat or .dif The format was later adopted in CDendro and then successively extended with meta data.

A typical file without meta data may look like this:

0.810
0.905
1.346
1.496
1.957
...... etc 

With meta data added as handled by CDendro it may look like this:

#DENDRO D:\ake\tree\NAMDO\NM003TST.wid     2010-12-26 17:10:40
#C DATED 1687
#C This is a comment stored
#C into a .wid-file...
0.810
0.905
1.346
1.496
1.957
..... etc

I.e. any line started with a # character is handled as a comment line. By convention CDendro writes the first line as shown above, but that "date and time of the file" is not used further within CDendro.

The sequence "#C DATED " is reserved for dating the ring width series. BC years should be written as negative years, e.g. "11 BC" as "-10"

With the 2010 December 6 version of CDendro Test/Development, comments may be bound also to individual ring width values, e.g.

1.175
1.921
1.863
1.746 #sb
1.794
1.304
0.859

In this case "sb" is used to identify the sapwood border. Such "point labels" can be added to any coordinate point when using CooRecorder. The label can be written to a .wid-file in CDendro with the command "Samples/Save ring width and PointLabels data as (.wid)" (Though note that this command has to first be enabled with a settings in CDendro.)
Note: These point labels originate in .pos files of CooRecorder (coordinate files) which can be added as members to a collection in CDendro. When doing a "Create mean value sample" command for that collection, all the labels will be copied to the resulting mean value file from which they may be written to a .wid file with the command mentioned above. These labels may also be exported in a tabular format from the collection itself.