Using Demeter with Strawberry Perl on Windows

Caveats

There are some known shortcomings of the Windows package at this time. These include:

1. I have not yet figured out how to reliably dispense with the "DOS box". Thus a command windows (with no command prompt) will appear every time you start one of the programs.

2. There is no updater script. To update to a new release, you'll have to download and install the entire installer. I am working on an updater, but it is not working yet.

3. The pluck buttons (i.e. the little bulls-eye buttons that are used to grab a point from a plot using the mouse) work, but they issue a spurious error message. This error message can be safely ignored after dismissing it by clicking the OK button, but I have not yet figured out how to make it not happen.

4. Windows desktop stuff like double clicking on a .prj file to launch Athena reading that file does not work yet.

5. If you install somewhere other than C:\strawberry, you will need to delete any existing demeter.ini file, which can be found in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\demeter\ (where User is your user name). This is due to a bug in the mechanism by which the paths to the Gnuplot and Feff executables is set.

6. In Athena, PCA, deconvolution, smoothing, and peak fitting are not yet implemented.

This is my to-do list. You might find that your suggestion is already on the list.

How to make an issue report

When you discover a problem...

• I need to know what happened. A recipe is better than an explanation. That is, give me data and a set of instructions for how to replicate the problem.
• It helps to see the screen output. The best way to capture this is to launch Athena (or Artemis or Hephaestus) from the command prompt. Do the following:

  • Open a command prompt.

  • Type dathena (or dartemis or dhephaestus) at the command line.

  • Operate the program to reproduce the problem.

  • Cut and paste the text that gets spewed to the screen or take a screenshot of the command window