General

KAPPA handles bad pixels, and processes quality, variance, World Co-ordinate System (WCS), and other information stored within NDFs . In order to achieve generality KAPPA does not process non-standard extensions; however, it does not lose non-standard ancillary data since it copies extensions to any NDFs that it creates. The standard extensions that KAPPA recognises are the FITS airlock, that holds metadata in the form of FITS headers; and PROVENANCE that records the lineage of an NDF, much like a family tree.

KAPPA can also process data in other formats, such as FITS and IRAF, using an automatic-data conversion facility (CONVERT, SSN/20).

Although oriented to image processing, many commands will work on NDFs of arbitrary dimension and others operate on both spectra and images, and cubes. Many applications handle all non-complex data types directly, for efficient memory and disc usage. Those that do not will usually undergo automatic data conversion to produce the desired result.

KAPPA's graphics are produced using the widely used PGPLOT package, and are thus device independent.

Most commands can be automatically re-invoked to process multiple NDFs by supplying a group of NDFs as input. Groups of NDFs can be specified using wild-cards, or by listing them explicitly either in response to a prompt or within a text file.