From nobody Thu Jul 9 15:06:49 1998 Path: newsfeed.cv.nrao.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!nntprelay.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!206.229.87.25!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-backup-west.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!128.143.2.44!hearst.acc.Virginia.EDU!murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU!elvis.med.Virginia.EDU!sdm7g From: sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU (Steven D. Majewski) Newsgroups: sci.data.formats,sci.techniques.spectroscopy Subject: Re: What the heck is EMSA/MAS file format? Date: 9 Jul 1998 16:53:03 GMT Organization: University of Virginia Lines: 54 Message-ID: <6o2shf$pj6$1@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: elvis.med.virginia.edu Xref: newsfeed.cv.nrao.edu sci.data.formats:350 sci.techniques.spectroscopy:1059 In article , Jim Conner wrote: >Subject says it all. Looking for information on this file format, which >is apparently used for spectroscopic data. How is the format defined? >What advantages does it have over, say, tab-delimited X-Y data? Is this >file format common or is it only rarely used? > >Thanks for any info on this! > >Jim Conner > [1] It's an ascii format. [2] It has standard tags for some meta data. [3] The meta data tag lines all start with "#" , for example: #FORMAT : EMSA/MAS Spectral Data File #VERSION : 1.0 #TITLE : Cu Grid #DATE : 07-Jul-1998 #TIME : 18:49 #OWNER : #NPOINTS : 56 #XUNITS : KeV #YUNITS : Counts #NCOLUMNS : 1 #DATATYPE : Y #XPERCHAN : 0.01 #OFFSET : 0.65 #SIGNALTYPE : EDS -- many unix derrived programs are used to treating "#" as a comment delimiter, so lots of program (Gnuplot for one example) will treat the file as just a list of numbers and ignore the metadata tags. [4] I wouldn't exactly call it "common", but file and metadata standards are not generally common in spectroscopy, where each instrument mfgr. has created his own file format. But it's fairly widely used in EDS as an interchange format -- most of the proprietary software I've seen has an option to import/export EMSA/MAS File Format. DTSA has plug-in's to read and write to that and other formats. I have (incompletely tested and documented) Lisp and Python routines to read & write EMSA/MAS. ( The Mac version of the Python program is a "droplet" -- you can drag and drop a whole folder of DTSA files onto the program icon and it will batch convert them to EMSA/MAS format. ) The spec is available at: And I have a copy on my web site at: