Hi, One of the new features in Athena 0.8.041 is a plug-in architecture for processing data files that are not recognized by Ifeffit. Ifeffit and Athena are pretty successful at importing data from many of the beam-lines around the world that do XAS, but there are a number of beam-lines whose data requires either special, hardwired code in Athena or intervention by the user before importing into Athena. Neither of these solutions is particularly satisfying. Here I describe my latest attempt to address this recurring problem. It is now possible to write a short perl Module and drop it in the correct location. Athena will find and load that module and use it to recognize and reformat data that could otherwise not be imported. Currently, Athena ships with three such plug-ins, one for NSLS X10C, one for APS 12BM, and one for NSLS X15B. The NSLS X10C plug-in is extensively documented and explains how to write other plug-ins. This means that any time a user runs into trouble importing data into Athena, a plug-in can be written and dropped into place. Athena will then be able to import that data. No upgrade required. How cool is that? So, if you have data that Athena has trouble with, you can take a stab at writing a plug-in. Or the beam-line scientist can do so. Or I can. Indeed, I encourage users and beam-line scientists from beam-lines that use formats that give trouble to Athena to contact me with examples of those data files. Or, even better, write a plug-in, send it to me, and I'll distribute it with my codes. B P.S. Some beam-lines that generate data that cannot immediately be read by Ifeffit include: * X10C at NSLS (Athena has for some time included special code for dealing with these data -- this chore has been moved to a plug-in) * 12BM at the APS (the header contains a line that confuses Ifeffit) * X15B at NSLS (uses a legacy binary format) * the XAS beam-line at the LNLS, (see http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/pipermail/ifeffit/2004-August/001335.html for that discussion) * At least one of the XAS BLs at SPring8 uses a confusing multi-column format and mono angle instead of energy * Any BL using Spec is likely to generate data files that Ifeffit cannot read * Much of the data in the Ferrel Lytle Database at IIT is in formats that cannot be directly imported into Athena Athena currently includes plug-ins for the first three BLs on this list, each involving less than 50 lines of code. These are easy things to write! The one for NSLS X15B, however, does not yet work on Windows. It works great on my Linux boxes, but I have yet to get it to work on Windows. Stay tuned. -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- bravel@anl.gov -or- ravel@phys.washington.edu Environmental Research Division, Building 203, Room E-165 Argonne National Laboratory phone and voice mail: (1) 630 252 5033 Argonne IL 60439, USA fax: (1) 630 252 9793 My homepage: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/