Hi Folks,

Version 0.9.38 of Larch has been released and binary installers are now available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.  There have been many minor improvements made in the past several months, particularly for the XAS Viewer application. XAS Viewer is now very close to having feature parity with Athena and Sixpack, with a few things still missing and a few things slightly improved.  This should be of particular interest for Mac users, where Athena has proven difficult to install and buggy, and support for Sixpack has also become harder.

At this point, XAS Viewer can read data from plain ASCII files or from recent Athena Project files, but does not yet support quite as many different file types as Athena and Sixpack -- help on this would be greatly appreciated!  It can do basic group manipulation such as merging, and groups and plot one or more XAFS spectra in various stages of the XAFS normalization process and can save data to Athena Project file or save multiple data sets to CSV files.  XAS Viewer has simple dialogs for doing common data correction steps including recalibration, rebinning of QXAFS data (as per a recent discussion), glitch removal, correcting over-absorption, smoothing, and spectral deconvolution.

For analysis, XAS Viewer has a notebook panel for pre-edge subtraction and normalization, and one for basic EXAFS processing (background removal and Fourier transforms to chi(R)).  Its main emphasis is on visualization and analysis of XANES spectra and so it includes panels dedicated to fitting pre-edge peaks, Linear Combination analysis, and Principal Component Analysis. Though definitely a Graphical User Interface, with forms to guide the novice user, XAS Viewer goes out its way to do all data processing through basic Larch commands that can be viewed, copied, and turned into batch processing scripts.

Documentation for all of Larch  is a continual work in progress, and docs

with screenshots for XAS Viewer is at

    https://xraypy.github.io/xraylarch/guis/xas_viewer.html

Feedback or suggestions on this or any other aspects of Larch are most welcome.

Larch can be installed with simple installers for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux which can be found from

    https://xraypy.github.io/xraylarch/installation.html

At the moment, these installers all assume 64-bit operating systems and now are built using Anaconda Python version 3.6.

If anyone needs to use Larch with 32-bit Windows please let me know.  Support for this will probably be dropped by the end of the calendar year, but I do not know if this is necessary at all at this point.

For people using Larch from Python, it can also be installed as a "conda package" for Anaconda Python, as with

    conda install -c GSECARS xraylarch

Currently, packages are available for Python 3.6, and packages for Python 2.7 should be available within a couple days.

Please let me know if you have any questions or problems,

--Matt