It has taken time to define practical solutions, and even then, problems have arisen with changes in underlying operating systems, and in the interfaces used by the software systems to be integrated. Version 5.0 will introduce both a separate NULL value, and floating-point raster cell values, both of which are necessary for a viable interface to statistics software. You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
The exported file was edited to remove message lines, and read into R . It would also have been valuable if work done several years ago on new formats for site data could be incorporated, since at present only a single attribute is optionally associated with each site as a label, the same resertiction applying to vector area data. In the Splancs library, described in the next section, these functions are used for cartographic presentation, and a simple choropleth mapping function is used elsewhere in this paper.