spec

Software for Diffraction

1.4.4. - Showscans



The showscans program is a shell script that serves as a front end for an awk script called show.awk, which is installed in the spec auxiliary file directory. The awk script prepares a C-PLOT command file that will be automatically run to make summary plots of scans from spec data files. Twelve scan plots are placed on each page. The text is very small, so a high resolution display device is recommended.

Usage is
showscans [options] [file_options] file [[file_options] file ...]
where the global options relate to C-PLOT commands and are:
 -eb error_bars   Error bar mode (default is 0, off). 
 -ft font   Font code (default is font 2). 
 -sy symbol   Symbol code (default is L, a line). 
 -zi filter   Graphics filter (default is psfilter). 
 -w   Wait for keyboard <return> after each page 
 -x   Shorthand for -zi "x11 -rotate" -w 

The file_options apply only to the next file on the command line and are:
 -f from_scan_number   Starting scan number for the following file. 
 -t to_scan_number   Ending scan number for the following file. 

In no scan numbers are specified, all the scans within a file will be processed.

File names that end with .I are ignored as they are assumed to be scans.4 index files, allowing you to use metacharacters to specify filenames a little more freely.

The awk script recognizes all the standard scan headings produced by the standard spec scan macros and uses that information to select the x-axis label and the column for the independent variable in the data file. The title of each of the small plots is the starting Q vector of the displayed scan, taken from the #Q line of the data files.


If the monitor counts are zero for any point in a scan, that scan is not plotted. The show.awk file can be edited to disable that feature.