The authors of DRAWxtl are pleased to announce the release of V4.3 and V5.3 of our program. As before, V5.3 has a full GUI, whereas V4.3 is command-line oriented with an openGL window displaying the active structure. Note: we skipped V5.2 so that our two series would have the same minor release number. The new software versions, including source code and binaries for Windows, Linux (i386 only) and Macintosh (universal binary), can be downloaded from http://www.lwfinger.net/drawxtl.
We have also published a description of the program in J. Appl. Cryst. 40, 188-192, 2007. There are too many changes in the new versions to list; however, the most important are as follows: 1. DRAWxtl can plot incommensurately modulated structures up to (3 + 3) dimensions. In addition composite crystals can be plotted, and the unit-cell for each component is drawn. 2. The unit-cell axis labels and the vector triple can be repositioned using the mouse (V5.3 only). 3. The program can now draw a best fitting plane through a list of atoms. 4. An RGB triple may be used to specify color as well as named colors. 5. The polyhedral sections now calculate the volume of the polyhedron, and for tetrahedra and octahedra, distortion parameters (quadratic elongation, angle variance) are calculated. 6. The program can generate stereo POV files for the unofficial version called StereoPOV. 7. Input of dn6 (O format) Fourier maps added. 8. Reading of electron density and electron localisation function files from EXCITING added. 9. Reading of DISCUS and FullProf input files added. 10. The slab cutout function now correctly handles non-rectangular slabs. 11. There is now a general file viewer under the 'View' menu (V5.3 only). 12. The loookat command now is honored by the GUI version (V5.3 only). 13. JANA-style M80 Fo/Fc files can be used to generate a Fourier map. 14. DRAWxtl can be called with a CIF file as its command-line argument, allowing its use as "graphics viewer" in JANA and probably other systems 15. Fixed addition of lone pairs through the GUI of V5.3. 16. Many problems in reading 'foreign' input files, particularly CIF, have been fixed.