3.7.1 Introduction

The SkeletonTable program is used to create   an ASCII text file called a skeleton table containing information about a given CDF. (SkeletonTable can also be instructed to output the skeleton table to the terminal screen.) It reads a CDF and writes into the skeleton table the following information.

1. Format (single or multi file), data encoding, variable majority.
2. Number of dimensions and dimension sizes for the rVariables.
3. gAttribute definitions (and gEntry values).
4. rVariable and zVariable definitions and vAttribute definitions (with rEntry/zEntry values).
5. Data values for all or a subset of the CDF's variables. Traditionally, only NRV variable values are written to a skeleton table. RV variable values may now also be written. NRV and RV variables are described in Section 2.3.10.

The above information is written in a format that can be ``understood'' by the SkeletonCDF   program (see Section 3.8). SkeletonCDF reads a skeleton table and creates a new CDF (called a skeleton CDF).