Importing EDS and CL spectrum files to Standard

[John Donovan]

I'm not sure if anyone will find this useful, but...

It was suggested by someone (sorry, can't remember who it was), that I add the ability to import EDS and CL spectra to the standard database.  This is now complete and works well if anyone would like to try it out.

See attached screen shots.  This feature is now available in v. 10.94 of PFE (or CalcZAF).   Please let me know what you think!

[John Donovan]

When we first implemented this feature in our Standard app back some time ago, we only tested this import capability with a Thermo EMSA EDS spectrum file (and of course the EMSA files exported from Probe for EPMA).

Recently Dave Adams tried to import Oxford EMSA EDS spectra into his standard compositional database and got an error.  So we took a look and found the problem and fixed that.  While we were at it we decided to check the other vendor EMSA (and MSA) file formats and discovered that everyone is exporting these files differently!  Specifically how the #NCOLUMNS parameter is specified is not consistent between the various vendors.

Speaking with Nicholas Ritchie recently, he explained that the EMSA standard is "over specified" and we should really ignore the #NCOLUMNS parameter and just check the #DATATYPE parameter which is either Y or XY.  Then just read them in as single values or pairs of values.  That worked!

Doing that has allowed us to import EMSA (and MSA) file properly from Oxford, JEOL, Bruker and Thermo. 

Here is the Import EDS button in the Standard composition dialog:



and here is the spectra imported into the standard composition database: