Programs used in creating the structure pages
A list of programs used to create the crystal structures
shown here:
- When we have trouble
determining the space group of a structure, we use Harold
Stokes' program FINDSYM,
which has an online interface. Also available is ISOTROPY,
a software package which applies group theoretical methods to
the analysis of crystal symmetry.
- The pictures of the atomic structure were produced from
XYZ format files by XMol
(version 1.3.1, Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.,
Minneapolis MN, 1993). The xyz files used by Xmol
can also be read by RasMol, a
freeware molecule viewer from the University of
Massachusetts. RasMol runs on PCs and Macs as well as
X11/Unix platforms, and can produce shaded molecules. Either
Xmol and RasMol can be configured
as a viewer to run with your favorite web browser.
- The fancy versions of the equations were generated by
LaTeX (Leslie Lamport, LaTeX - A Document Preparation
System, Addison-Wesley, 1994, ISBN 0-201-52983-1).
- Xmol figures and images of LaTeX files were originally
converted to GIF format by XV (Copyright 1989, 1994 by John
Bradley). Now, however, we use display, an image
viewer/manipulator in the ImageMagick(TM)
package, and to capture and save pictures in the Portable Network Graphics
(PNG) format.
- Lately, we have been experimenting with the use of jmol, a Java-based
GPL viewer which duplicates many (but not all) of the
features of Xmol. Pictures are saved in Portable Pixmap (PPM)
format, and then transformed to PNG format with John Cristy's
convert program, also found in the ImageMagick(TM)
package. jmol requires a Java runtime environment.
We use Blackdown
Java-Linux.
- Since jmol has yet to implement Xmol's ``split-view,'' we
use a LaTeX
template, convert that to Portable Document Format
(PDF), and use convert to change that to a PNG
graphic.
Go back to Crystal
Lattice Structure page.
