The Evans function is a powerful tool for the stability analysis of viscous
shock profiles; zeros of this function carry stability information. In the
one-dimensional case, it is typical to compute the Evans function using
Goodman's integrated coordinates [G1]; this device facilitates the search for
zeros of the Evans function by winding number arguments. Although integrated
coordinates are not available in the multidimensional case, we show here that
there is a choice of coordinates which gives similar advantages