On Tuesday 12 January 2010 05:22:25 pm Lisa Van Loon wrote:
I am using Athena in Windows and I have been having trouble with some project files. I would like to determine the cause: after closing the original file I am unable to reopen the project file again properly. I have attached a file to demonstrate the problem (test1.prj) Saving different versions does not help. When I open the file, no spectrum is displayed. (If I click on a file during the importing then that spectrum will remain displayed). At the bottom the "removing background..." never says "done". It seems like everything is working except the graphing window. I haven't been able to determine what is different about this data from other data that opens without any problem.
Lisa, Wow. This was a tricky one. I had to follow several false leads before actually figuring out the problem here. Here's the story: At one point in the process of importing data from a file, header lines get truncated to 256 characters if they are longer than that. Several of the header lines in your orginal data files (in a separate email, Lisa sent me the original data files) are longer than 256. That by itself is not a problem. However, when some of these long header files were truncated, you had the misfortune of having the 256th character come after an open parens and before a close parens. This triggered a problem in Ifeffit that it has when it encounters an unmatched and unescaped open parens in a character string. Way back in the early days of Athena (maybe 6 years ago or more), this was a serious issue leading to all sorts of troubled and unhappy users. I thought I had fixed the problem, but apparently I only fixed the most common examples of this problem. Your specific data files represented an edge case that slipped through the cracks. Sigh. I now have things fixed. Not only do your data files no longer lead to a project file displaying this problem, I even figured out a way to fix your broken project on the fly. Sadly, there is no work-around for you in Athena. The only immediate solution is unpleasent -- you will have to edit each offending file by hand and remove the very long header lines. Ick! I will build a new Windows executable soon which incorporates the fix and make it available to the automated updater. However this will take a few days as I have another Athena improvement that needs to get written and tested before I make the release. I am working on that right now, so I am hopeful that I'll have a new version by next week. I hope. Sorry for the hassle. Thanks *very much* for complaining about it. As I have said many many times, the extent to which my programs are any good at all is a tribute to the kidn and helpful feedback that I have received from all the users. Regards, B P.S. While I am at it, I'll look into the issue of non-ascii characters in filenames that Mingliang asked about earlier today. -- Bruce Ravel ------------------------------------ bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Methods Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2 Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 My homepage: http://xafs.org/BruceRavel EXAFS software: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/