the circumstances were one that were not necessary. the code was making use of a local helper routine for reading 2D data to read 1D data (node-based), and so freesurfer was writing node data as 2D where the second dimension was '1'. since i just noticed that bit in the spec about the last dim not allowed to be '1', i changed the helper routine (which made the code cleaner), since i thought i might be breaking someone elses reader by writing files with a last dim of '1'.

so if there are valid reasons to have a last dim of '1', then maybe a check should not be made, or perhaps the spec should not mention that the last dim cannot be '1'. i dont have strong feelings on this, so its up to you i think.