popLA Manual (PDF) - Materials Science and Engineering

BASIC FEATURES
Structure
popLA is a menu oriented program; it has a Main Menu from which the user gets to the second layer of menus,
(entitled pages in this document) which call the various programs that do the actual calculations. Each program
returns control to an appropriate page after completion. Navigation through the menus is accomplished by
typing the number of the desired option. DO NOT press Return after entering an option; execution begins as
soon as the number is typed. When input is requested within a program it must be followed by the Return key.
Often when a program requests input it will display a frequently used default value. Pressing the Return key by
itself will accept the default value for that option.
In this document, information that popLA displays on the screen is displayed in the following format:
Please type a number from 0 to 8 -->
Information that you enter in respond is typed in bold italics.
Please type a number from 0 to 8 --> 1
In the documentation, the word “type” will be used when popLA expects input without the Return key, and
“enter” when it expects the information to be followed by the Return key.
Conventions
At the menu stages of the program, entering option “0” terminates the program and returns control to the DOS
command shell. Entering option “1” returns the program to the top menu level. Within programs there is no
standard method for exiting the routine cleanly without execution,. Execution of a program can be halted by
typing Control-C. popLA will respond
Terminate batch job? (Y/N) Y
Typing “Y” will return control the DOS command shell. You can restart popLA in the normal manner. Typing
"N" will go back to a page of popLA.
File Types and Names
popLA makes extensive use of disk files. In fact, each program is a separate file which is loaded as required, a
process invisible to the user. However, in order to effectively use the program it is necessary to understand the
different types of data files that it creates. The majority of files are in standard ASCII text format and can be
viewed with a variety of DOS utilities. There are essentially two kinds of files used by popLA – data files and
property files. A description of the different types of files is given in Appendix B.
Data files contain the actual data measured on the X-Ray machine or generated by a computer program.
Each data file contains texture information about a specific sample. Each mathematical transformation
performed by popLA produces a new file, which shares the same filename as the original data file but with a
different extension. (e.g. AL2O3.RAW, AL2O3.EPF, etc.) We call the part of the filename before the extension
the "specimen name" (or "specname" - AL203 in the above example). It should be entered as a parameter when
starting popLA. In this manual, ".EPF" (etc.) means "specname.EPF": you must enter the whole filename.
Because popLA can perform many different mathematical operations, a single data file created by an X-Ray
machine can easily generate ten or more related data files. You may be concerned about the amount of space
taken up by the various data files created by a single sample. There is no need to keep them all, since popLA
can always re-create the files from the original data. Generally the .EPF file is kept rather than the .RAW file.
The .SOD file is the parent of all files following from the WIMV analysis.
Property files contain information used by popLA to perform various mathematical transformations. A
single property file may be useful for many different samples. Property files are kept in the main directory C:\X
so that they can be found easily by all users. Your own data files are best kept in a separate directory.
BASIC FEATURES 7