Mauricio, Bruce and Norbert gave good answers about why Ifeffit chokes on this data, and what might be done about it. One question for you is: how are these data files normally read? Does the beamline provide some utilities for dealing with these? Ifeffit's read_data() was meant to read ASCII columns of floating point numbers only. That's certainly limited. It might be remarkable that it's been good enough so far, or it might be that enough beamline data is close enough to this format already. I originally expected that either beamline-specific read_XXX() commands would have to be added or that the front ends would have to translate the data and not use read_data(). It's probably a lot easier to do the translation in perl, awk, or any editor with search-and-replace (you could just replace ':' and '/' with '0' and read_data() would work) than write a specific routine in Fortran to read this data. I'd be willing to add other read_XXX() commands, but have not seen the need yet. It's also possible to modify read_data() to ignore non-numerical columns. Do others have beamline data file formats that Ifeffit/Athena has problems with that should be handled? --Matt