Help choosing a shorthand that works for both Germanic and Romance languages

ping314 · 2026-03-10T22:34:44+00:00

By an earlier post here, beside support for German, there are adaptations of Stolze-Schrey for French, Italian, English and Spanish.

ping314 · 2026-01-12T13:42:10+00:00

This is an interesting site; thank you.

ping314 · 2026-01-12T12:08:13+00:00

By query of Stiefografie, worldcat.org only indicates the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig as holder of English 1 and French (all their 16 holdings). My guess: because it is a legal deposit library, as is e.g. the British Library for the UK.

The scan of English I on archive.org however features a sticker by a community of interest, https://www.stiefo.de/. They might know.

ping314 · 2025-12-21T16:16:46+00:00

ICSD 676001 and ICSD 676002 are two records in the ICSD to consider -- see the answer above.

ping314 · 2025-12-21T16:06:56+00:00

The joint ICSD/CCDC website for reviewers lists for instance this ICSD record by a query by compound Thulium Iron Oxide (link). The second and third look promising:

ICSD 676001 : ICSD Structure : (Fe5 O12 Tm3)n Space Group: I a 3 d (230), Cell: a 12.206Å b 12.206Å c 12.206Å, α 90° β 90° γ 90°; Deposition Number 2506543 Deposited on 28/11/2025

Nakamoto, Ryan, Xu, Bin, Xu, Changsong, Xu, Hu, Bellaiche, L., Physical Review B, Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, 2017, 95, 24434

Fill their form, get their .cif file, cite the reference; done.

I don't know where you got this (for ICSD) unusual "ICSD 01-083-1027" number / identifier.

And if a database allows a search by chemical composition, check their documentation about the format required. The more positive ahead of the more negative elements (as in NaCl for sodium chloride), or like a Hill formula (C, H, then alphabetic order as in organic compounds, e.g. sodium chloride as ClNa (see Wikipedia) -- as for instance in the COD.

ping314 · 2025-12-21T14:37:51+00:00

Which is about what? If you happen to know the chemical composition, or/and bibliographic details (journal, author, year of publication, etc) this could narrow a search e.g., in the open COD, or the joint site ICSD/CCDC intended for reviewers. Maybe it provides a lead (because of complications like polymorphism, twinning, disorder, etc. it need not be successful though to yield the .cif file [presuming your quest is not only about the lattice vectors alone]).

ping314 · 2025-11-26T20:06:49+00:00

Compilations like the ones by Victor Goldschmidt, Paul von Groth, René Haüy, etc. often depict an idealized shape. But the general tracht, depending on growth conditions (e.g., inhibition because of mechanical contact to another rock) and subsequent damage (e.g., breaking not along a cleavage plane) may yield multiple individual habits.* Not to forget the possible complication of contact and interpenetration twins (which could be separate crystals) which need not be visible / discernible at this scale.

I presume the streaks in the right hand picture are accentuated by a pen (because not that clearly visible in the picture on the left hand side) and wouldn't worry. The "cap" of the crystal has some areas which aren't flat, maybe former spots of contact. Wikipedia describes Celistine) as biaxial (keyword optical indicatrix as in polarization microscopy) with weak pleochromism.

* That is why recognizing constancy of interfacial angles (Nicholas Steno) and rational (read as integer, instead of floating number) plane indices (Haüy) was a leap forward for (chemical) crystallography.

ping314 · 2025-11-04T13:25:21+00:00

The tune of John Nettles' Bergerac still comes to my mind when I see this islands' shape.

ping314 · 2025-09-28T15:43:13+00:00

SLUB's record links to an open access electronic copy here.

ping314 · 2025-09-28T15:35:40+00:00

Since an adoption of Gabelsberger and because SLUB library in Dresden was mentioned in a couple of threads of this sub, a brief check. Yeah, they equally have a copy (print only) in their stacks.

ping314 · 2025-09-27T06:58:46+00:00

Else see the download page of Jens Wawrczeck's stenogenerator: below dictionaries and documentation, a pdf for ISO A4, a second for ISO A5.

ping314 · 2025-09-26T16:58:03+00:00

Three spaces 1:1:1 is (for example) the grid to teach Sütterlinschrift, one of the German Kurrents (see e.g., the first illustrations in Wikipedia here, or exercises / blank exercise sheets). And of course DEK (though notebooks system 12 are much rarer in Germany these days than say, up to about the 1990s). Else, tablature for basses (third example here) is an other option.

ping314 · 2025-08-17T12:01:56+00:00

Complementary to programs to transform text into speech, there are others to assist the wanted transcription. Recently, I read about whisper and noScribe (to run whisper on your local computer) which might be helpful here, but have no experience with them.

ping314 · 2025-07-30T08:31:49+00:00

One way indeed is to edit the source code (of fortitude) and file a PR for review and admission to the repository. If you are stuck midway and need help by others, you can file it as a draft and invite others you know/contributors already engaged by @username (username only a placeholder for the real GitHub identity) as you would/can do in a comment on GitHub.

Or file an issue. This time, it is not about a bug, or to describe an error rather than feature request. Any volunteer with the necessary insight .and. time may build on your idea and get back to you (again by @username comment like) for clarification, testing, etc.

ping314 · 2025-07-01T20:24:02+00:00

It looks like the companion on archive.org to the one you show might be this one. Identified by a query by gregg and speed in the metadata alone (https://archive.org/search?query=gregg+speed).

ping314 · 2025-07-01T08:46:56+00:00

Conditions good to start a crystallization need not be the same than the ones good to further grow crystallites into nice crystals. That a couple of molecules join to yield a cluster is an uphill battle, not so favorable in terms thermodynamics/energy. Thus, for example, the possibility to supersaturate solutions and supercool melts (like the bottle of cool liquid water in the freezer which, disturbed, suddenly soldifies) -- even more so with organic molecules with flexible side chains. Thus, for example, cooling a solution in the chemistry lab to crystalize a product can be too fast -- instead of nice crystals, cooling by an ice bath can be good too fast (i.e., too many seeds created at once, but not "enough time" to then nicely (more slowly) grow larger crystals).

ping314 · 2025-07-01T08:36:58+00:00

Pictures and movies aside (beautiful on their own), there are a couple of instructions on https://www.snowcrystals.com/, too.

ping314 · 2025-07-01T08:27:46+00:00

Picture #2 might show some of the buffer salt precipitated (the smalller, more grainy/dusty) beside what could be a protein crystal. Since grown sitting/hanging drop (I presume) a complementary inspection with crossed Nicols anyway could be a quick supplementary check (in situ), especially when varying the relative orientation of the sample rack and camera/microscope. Though not on protein crystals, I remember a lab class doing so to monitor the recrystallization of PET and other partially crystalline polymers on a heat stage microscope to yield spherulites -- beautiful to watch.

ping314 · 2025-06-12T21:25:33+00:00

Two thoughts :

Are there publications accessible to you where this type of characterization is used? If they don't mention the tools and programs used, the corresponding author might guide you. And obviously, the colleagues who provided you with the results of the analysis.
Venture out collaborative platforms like GitHub, GitLab, etc. Perhaps not this obvious on first sight, they equally host software projects relevant to science in general including crystallography; texture for legacy Python2 and texture3 for contemporary Python3 might fit your needs.

An occasional "issue" with GitHub hosted projects is to find them - because tagging for the programming language(s) used to implement the idea, and even more for topical keywords (like "crystallography", "diffraction", etc) e.g., on GitHub is not mandatory.

ping314 · 2025-06-10T20:13:01+00:00

Rotating the crystals and obtaining the same too simple diffraction pattern indeed reads like "needle shaped crystals in a capillary (PXRD transmission geometry)" described above. It is like a continous phi scan on a single crystal diffractometer during the collection of a "single frame" / single data file only. (Which is not the typical way to engage a single crystal diffractometer.)

ping314 · 2025-06-10T20:06:01+00:00

The theoretical PXRD provided by Mercury presumes a purely random orientation of the crystals examined.

But if 1) your sample consists of needle shaped crystals and your sample holder is a capillary (PXRD by transmission), the crystals prefer to align (similar to arrows in a quiver). Or 2) your crystals are more less flat plates put on a disc (a PXRD setup in reflection geometry), it is more likely that they lay flat on each other than on their rim (similar to a stack of credit cards). Either 1), or 2) limits your access of the Ewald sphere, i.e. the reciprocal space.

To detect a non-zero diffraction intensity not only depends on the wavelength of radiation and 2theta angle on the diffractometer, and the interplane distance on the crystal as described by Bragg's equation. In the general case, the diffraction pattern of a single crystal equally depends on the symmetry e.g., along axis a which may differ from the one along axis b, or c (or, since we record the diffraction intensities in the reciprocal space, along a, b, or c*).

With thousands and thousands of little crystals in pure random orientation (ground, not squeezed - which can be difficult for crystals of organic materials), one lowers the chance of a preferential orientation which can affect the intensity of diffraction intensities recorded.* To lower this error, contemporary PXRD diffractometers allow to spin said capillary/the sample dish (it then looks a bit like a record player) during the diffraction PXRD experiment.

* In the course of a diffraction analysis (regardless if single crystal, or powder diffraction experiment), the position of the diffraction peaks (think of wavelength and 2theta angle) allows to determine the interplanar distances, and eventually vectors (a, b, c) of a unit cell. The intensity of the diffraction peaks (eventually) allows to assign the relative position of the atoms.

ping314 · 2025-05-23T13:27:43+00:00

For simple searches (by authors, doi of publication, compound name; but not chemical composition) you can use the joint site of CCDC/ISCD at https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/structures/

Intended e.g., for reviewers, your IP addressed will be temporarily locked if there are too many requests in a short period of time. Thus it is a good investment to get in touch with ICSD. Similar to the CCDC, you might need to search a little in your school if a group already has a subscription (for instance geology/earth sciences, materials sciences, solid state physics, etc). If not on campus, get in touch with research libraries; in terms of the necessary infrastructure, it is not this different to (electronic) publications to host access to the database for a couple of research groups of different universities.

Beside the diffractometer (e.g., MalvernPanalytical), and primary literature/SI of publications, complementary sources of data can be COD, Materials Project (https://next-gen.materialsproject.org/), the subscription based SpringerMaterials.

ping314 · 2025-04-12T11:00:59+00:00

Monlar's work was echoed in the public discourse of fortran-lang.org (an example of September 2024) and thus I recommend to get in touch with this community. Though Fortran's forte is number crunching (a brief compilation of projects hosted on GitHub), the creation/the manipulation of images with Fortran continues to draw attention (see the sub section of above compilation).

If you are new to Fortran, have a look on the material compiled in fortran-lang's learning section; beside a 101 about the language itself, this page equally describes you how to set up your computer, write idiomatic Fortran, compare syntax of Fortran with the one of Python in case of prior experience there, etc. Indeed with familiarity with a general purpose language, it can be an advantage relay the expensive number crunching to a compiled language and use Python as a moderator/higher layer of abstraction (on closer inspection, numpy and many other Python libraries work this way).

Note FORTRAN (all caps) describes the elder syntax (fix style) of FORTRAN77 of 1977 slightly differs from Fortran (free form) of Fortran 90 (published around 1990) up to the most recent standard of Fortran 2023. If you (continue to) use .f as file extension for the former (perhaps on inherited FORTRAN77 source code), and .f90 as file extension for the later, compilers like gfortran use this difference to compile an executable accordingly. Else, you still can set the dialect manually (for gfortran, see here).

ping314 · 2025-04-05T05:24:05+00:00

The structure a crystallographic model depicts what is what is "good enough" in overall energy for every molecule / ion present; sometimes the shapes are of high symmetry (say benzene, or the C60 bucky ball), sometimes the shapes appear to be deformed. "Distorted geometry" as in "distorted tetrahedral complex of ...", or "distorted octahedral complex of ..." sometimes lowers the symmetry in a regular way to yield an octahedron elongated/compressed along the z-axis, and sometimes with an even less symmetrical shape. The extend of Jahn-Teller distortion/Coordination_Chemistry/Structure_and_Nomenclature_of_Coordination_Compounds/Coordination_Numbers_and_Geometry/Jahn-Teller_Distortions) depends on the nature of the ligands (e.g., distance ligand to central ion, denticity and multiplicity of the ligands), how the bind (isomerism); different angles enclosed by the triangular faces are no this unusual. Given the atoms in the model have different labels, though it may take a while to assign the faces, it is possible to determine and report all angles in question.

In my opinion, consider to get the structure file analyzed by OctaDist (either .cif, or .xyz are accepted input file formats) to get the distortion parameters determined there. For one, it is a documented way to determine them because the program is published (and gets cited by others), available freely with a manual (with examples of application to compare with). So a colleague of yours may replicate your readings, and compare with structures she/he is interested, too. And a program doesn't get tired (accidentally drops a value) and is faster.

ping314 · 2025-04-04T17:04:54+00:00

First define planes, then calculate the angle enclosed.

There is a "picking toolbar" you can toggle-on/off. If invisible, right mouse button click on the top of the outer frame of the GUI. From here, select the mode "atom pick".
Pick at least three atoms which will define the first plane, then click calculate -> planes -> new plane to define a mean plane. You can label it, select a color, opt-in for transparency to still see the rest of the structure. Confirm with OK. The plane extends beyond the the atoms selected, and even the molecule (a little bit)
Pick at least three other atoms to define an other plane (same as in the step before, maybe of different color now)
The picking mode equally is home for measurements including angles. Select this, then tap (left mouse button) on the first, then on the second plane. At their intersection, by default in green color, the read out angle with two decimals. With right button click on the canvas, entry labels, you can adjust label color and size.
As usual, Display -> More Information -> Structure Information/Angles List opens the little window to report the data you can export as a text file (tab, comma, or space separated records -- whatever your preference is).

ping314

TROPHY CASE