TOPAS-Academic - Tutorials

These tutorials were developed in 2005 for using jedit with topas v3. They use the jedit menus which were in place at the time. Since then menus have been significantly updated so what you see on your screen may be slightly different. If you want to get identical screenshots save the file linked here to your C:\Documents and Settings\dch0jse\.jedit\xinsert directory.

There are also now "shortcut menus" which guide you through the commonest types of refinement in the "Topas_Durham" menus. These are usually the quickest and most logical way of setting up input files. Typical walk-through examples are available: e.g. a lab Rietveld refinement of TiO2; a lab Pawley refinement of TiO2.

The tutorials assume:

TA and jEdit have been installed (see instructions) and that you've set up jedit so that topas menus are available. If you don't have the topas menus then make sure you've run the jEdit macro INP-SETUP.BSH run from within jEdit using the jEdit menu option "Macros/Run Other Macro".

You have downloaded the necessary data files for the tutorials. The data files themselves can be downloaded by extracting the .zip file linked here. Alternatively you can download the .zip file ta_tutorials.zip linked here (~3.5 Mb) and extract the contents to any directory. It contains all the webpages about topas academic, jedit and all the tutorial files. Open the folder ta_tutorials and launch ta_tutorials.html.

You have a licensed version of topas.

The tutorials describe using alt-tab to switch between windows applications. Such keyboard shortcuts are often quicker than using the mouse.

[The screen shots were created using jedit menus developed in 2005. Some of the Durham menus have been updated considerably since that time to make setting up files easier. To get identical screenshots save the file linked here to your C:\Documents and Settings\dch0jse\.jedit\xinsert directory.]

Here are the Tutorials

Running Examples

Simple Rietveld refinement of Laboratory X-ray data of Rutile

Pawley refinement of Y2O3

Peak fitting and Indexing of PbSO4

Structure solution of PbSO4

TOF calibration / refinement of CeO2

Variable Counting Time data - Rietveld

Distortion Mode (ISODISPLACE) Refinements

Discussion

The tutorials demonstate that editors of the calibre of jEdit are a natural choice in the writing of INP scripts. Remembering keywords or their placement in the TA data structures are not necessary and the speed and ease of setting up INP files are equal to the best of data input strategies. It is however necessary to have an idea of what some of the keywords and TA macros do. For example, the use of instrumental convolutions such as Divergence, Slit_Width or whether or not the anode is Cu or Co are user decisions. You should also search the TA Technical Reference for finding out about keywords.