FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Why is there no graphical user interface?
In contrast to almost any other texture analysis software MTEX has no graphical user interface but provides scripting languages. We believe that this has the following advantages
- documented workflow: you will always remember all options which gave you the result
- reproducible results: running a script multiple times gives you the same results
- templates for common tasks: just replace the names of the data files and repeat the calculations
- automatically process multiple data sets with different parameters
- great flexibility: you can combine every tool with every other tool
On the downside, scripts are often thought to be complicated to learn and tedious to write. However, how would you learn a GUI bases program? You would use a script which tells you in which order to click which buttons. In MTEX you give the script directly to the computer and he does process it for you. We also believe that MTEX scripts are easy to read for humans as well. Take the following example:
% import some EBSD data, while aligning the x,y coordinates to follow the % Euler angle coordinate system ebsd = loadEBSD([mtexDataPath filesep 'EBSD' filesep 'twins.ctf'],'convertSpatial2EulerReferenceFrame' ); % plot the orientations plot(ebsd('indexed'),ebsd('indexed').orientations) % compute grains grains = calcGrains(ebsd('indexed')); % and draw the grain boundaries hold on plot(grains.boundary) hold off

Why Matlab?
Matlab offers a very comfortable scripting interface as well as a very powerful graphics engine. A reasonable alternative is Phyton which would have several advantages. However, so far there are no plans for migration.
Which Matlab version and which toolboxes do I need?
MTEX does not require any additional Matlab toolbox and shall work fine with student version. A comprehensive table that shows which MTEX version runs on which Matlab versions can be found here.
I get crazy plots, empty plots, plot with wrong colors
This is most likely a Matlab rendering issue. You can change the renderer Matlab uses for plotting by
% this is some arbitrary plot command plot(grains('indexed'),grains('indexed').meanOrientation) % apply this command directly after the plot command set(gcf,'renderer','zBuffer')
I'm going to colorize the orientation data with the standard MTEX colorkey. To view the colorkey do: oM = ipfColorKey(ori_variable_name) plot(oM)

I have crazy characters in my plots. What can I do?
This indicates that your MATLAB installation has problems to interpret LaTex. As a workaround switch off LaTex by uncommenting the following line in mtex_settings.m.
setMTEXpref('LaTex',false);
How can I import my data
You might use the import_wizard by typing
import_wizard

See also
MTEX fails to import EBSD OSC files
The OSC file format is a commercial binary EBSD format that has undergone heavy changes. For that reason it is hard for MTEX to keep up with a functional interface. As a workaround export your data to ANG file. Those can be easily imported into MTEX.
MTEX 5.2.beta1 |