MTZTONA4 (CCP4: Supported Program)

NAME

mtztona4, na4tomtz - interconvert MTZ reflection file and ASCII format.

SYNOPSIS

mtztona4 hklin foo.mtz hklout foo.na4
na4tomtz hklin foo.na4 hklout foo.mtz

DESCRIPTION

The mtztona4 and na4tomtz programs interconvert binary and ASCII reflection files for transport of reflection data between machine types.

No input is required, other than the command line with file assignments.

mtztona4 can optionally produce a run-length-encoded (RLE) format that is more compact than the original NA4 format; however the old version of na4tomtz cannot read the new format (it will echo the input data to standard output without converting it). Only the current version of na4tomtz can convert the RLE format back to MTZ (of course the current na4tomtz can also convert the old NA4 format to MTZ).

To select the RLE option in mtztona4, define the environment variable: CCP4_RLENA4 (na4tomtz does not require this to be defined as it detects automatically NA4 or RLE format).

N.B. With the current version of the CCP4 library there is little need for the NA4 format since MTZ files may be read transparently on different architectures (though it is useful for sending data by e-mail).

DETAILS OF OPERATION

mtztona4 gets index values from the ranges for each column for REAL to CHARACTER*4 inter-conversion, with REALs converted to INTEGER in the range 0 to 2**24-1. (Negative numbers are converted to 2's complement.) Then the INTEGER value is converted to CHARACTER*4 using a 64-character translation table.

After an ASCII readable header is output to HKLOUT the reflection data are stored as characters. A sample of an output file is given below: 


u000200000002Kk0eU0000000000000000000000000000000000
u000200040005ts0B000000000007hc07w000000000000000000
u000200080003Kk0K80000000000000000000000000000000000

If the MTZ file is converted so that unmeasured items are flagged (F's with zero sigmas changed to NaN's), and the CCP4_RLENA4 option is activated, the same piece of output looks like this: 


u%02*22Kk0eU%.7
u%02%04%05ts0B%0.17hc07w%.3
u%02%08%03Kk0K8%.7

ACCURACY

The errors are in relation to the largest absolute value in the column, so in general you will have an error of 0.01 relative to about 90000 or 1 in 10**8, which is not likely to cause any problems.

FILE SIZES

The run-length-encoded format gives a somewhat smaller file than either the original MTZ file or the old NA4 file, for example (sizes in bytes): 
-rw-r--r--  1 programs   169684 Mar  2 13:14 toxd.mtz
-rw-r--r--  1 programs   172130 Mar  3 12:12 toxd.na4
-rw-r--r--  1 programs   110437 Mar  3 12:14 toxd_flag.rle

EXAMPLE

  mtztona4  hklin toxd  hklout  toxd.na4
  na4tomtz  hklin  toxd.na4  hklout  toxd

AUTHOR

Ian Tickle, Birkbeck College