Hi, There are three aspects to this morning's thread that I'll comment on. (1) I won't disagree that XAS data should be presented to the beamline user in the form of signal as a function of energy. That should be considered a standard format for data presentation. That said, it is, apparently, less clear to me than to some others what Athena should and shouldn't do. Athena already has utilities for e.g. converting from keV to eV (a fairly trivial chore) and converting dispersive data measured as a function of pixel position into data as a function of energy (a fairly tricky chore). It's not clear to me that encoder to energy conversion is so very different from those. It'll be easy enough to ignore, if it really bugs you ;-) (2) I am uncomfortable with the phrase "the Athena test". I cannot comfortably be a part of any discussion of file standardization that has such an obvious conflict of interest built in from the get-go. (3) Supporting data harvested from SPEC files has long been on my list of things to do. A good, object-oriented interface to spec files built with perl would take a week or two of solid work to build and test properly. I am aware of many beamlines (a few at the ESRF for example, as well as any crystallography beamline that wants to pop off a quick absorption scan) that use SPEC, so that would be a useful thing to have -- not just for Athena but for anything in perl that wants to play with SPEC files. (A quick google search turns up nothing of the sort, sadly.) The issue of incompletely documented columns is, as Matt pointed out, a real one with SPEC files. However, it's not a problem unique to SPEC files. DND-CAT, for instance, produces files that have that problem in spades. (Well... the ones that Dave Barton keeps sending to me do...!) Dealing with non-obvious files is the reason that Athena's column-selection dialog replots the data every time you click one of the column buttons. This allows you to poke at an unclear file until you find some columns that make sense. B -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- ravel@phys.washington.edu Code 6134, Building 3, Room 405 Naval Research Laboratory phone: (1) 202 767 2268 Washington DC 20375, USA fax: (1) 202 767 4642 NRL Synchrotron Radiation Consortium (NRL-SRC) Beamlines X11a, X11b, X23b National Synchrotron Light Source Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 My homepage: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/