#mineralogical databases
4 messages in this thread
Anyone know of software you can suggest to either display crystals and
mineralogical information on species and/or store information of a collection?
Peter,
There is a program called Shape by Eric Dowty, copyright 1994, v4.0, which
will display crystals from certain crystal parameters. It can be fairly
powerful, and is used by some of the mineral magazines to generate graphics to
illustrate their articles. It comes in PC and Mac flavors, and is disttributed
by Rockware. (I believe that Rockware has a CIS address; perhaps Doug can help
me out here.) Cost is about $100.
Shape requires that you supply the crystal indices, etc. It is not a
mineral database, although it will save files created and redisplay later. My
kingdom (or serfdom) for a good mineral db that pulled together
crystallographic, chemical, geological information by species. So far I have
not seen anything truly comprehensive. I may have to take a sabbatical, learn
how to program in Advanced Revelations, and make one of my own!
Nathan
Thanks for the info. I have tried Minlog – but was disappointed. I would like
to catalog my collection on computer and draw the ideal crystals and print out
chemical formulae etc. If you develop one such program I'll be your first
customer!
What part of Laurasia do you live on? What kind of collecting?
Hi, Peter–
We get an occasional participant from Gondwana here also, so be careful what
you assume 🙂
–Doug