mca2edf(1)

✨ mca2edf ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because this little cutie lives in the PyMca X-Ray Fluorescence Toolkit manual and it's literally here to turn your SPEC files into EDF files 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

mca2edf — no cap, its whole job is converting SPEC file format files into EDF format 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

mca2edf [OPTIONS] [FILES]

like… that's it. options, then files. iconic.

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so story time 📖

Back in the day, X-ray maps at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility were stored as a set of images in ESRF Data Format (EDF). And the way that worked? The image rows were tied to points of a horizontal sample scan, and the image columns were tied to the spectrum channels. so it's giving very structured, very grid-core ✨

This tool lets you take a set of files that the PyMca Toolkit has wrapped as SPEC file format — which means, sadly, they've got no sample position information 😭 — and convert them into European Synchrotron Radiation Facility data format (EDF).

ngl its usefulness is nowdays somehow limited, because recent PyMca developements let you reshape nspectra x nchannels datasets inside the tools that actually make use of the shape information (pymcaroitool, pymcapostbatch). so it's a bit of a legacy queen 👑

🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

• mca2edf — opens a dialog so you can pick your input files, your output directory, and how many spectra go on each horizontal row. very choose-your-own-adventure 🫶
• mca2edf --outdir=/tmp --mcastep=2 *.mca — converts all the .mca files in the current directory into a set of EDF files containing two spectra. output goes to /tmp 📁
• mca2edf --outdir=/tmp --mcastep=2 --listfile=input_file — same as before, but applied to all the files listed in input_file. every single line of input_file has to contain a valid file name, okay? don't try anything cute 😤

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• pymcaroitool
• pymcapostbatch

that's the whole page bestie, go convert something 💜

this one came from ESRF, dated March 2012, and it's part of the PyMca X-Ray Fluorescence Toolkit manual. mwah, slay, periodt 💅✨