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New services for prospective authors of Acta Cryst. C: checkcif and printcif

Having problems with CIF submissions to Acta? Not got the hang of editing your SHELXL CIF into a full structural paper? Hesitant about making your first submission in this new format?

Then you may be interested in using one or both of the new services provided by Acta Crystallographica, Section C, which are designed to make the mysteries of CIF a little less fearsome. Both are automatic program systems, which will accept a CIF by e-mail and mail the results back to you. The relevant addresses are checkcif@iucr.ac.uk and printcif@iucr.ac.uk. Send only the CIF - make sure there is no accompanying message or signature line; and ensure that your mailer sends out the message in pure ASCII format, and not MIME-encoded (though we can usually handle this, if you have no option).

checkcif

This utility checks the file syntax, to make sure you haven't transgressed the simple formatting rules. If it finds any mistakes, it tells you what they are (with a full description of each error on its first occurrence). It tries to notify you of all the mistakes you've made (previous checking software just told you about the first), but examine its output carefully - a single syntax error might spark off a cascade of error reports, just because, say, a single semicolon was missing.

If the CIF is syntactically sound, additional checks are then carried out on the structure it reports, a subset of the numeric checks carried out in Chester when a paper is submitted. At present, you will be told if your paper is lacking any of the requirements stipulated by the Commission on Journals; some physical quantities will be calculated and compared with values in your file; and the MISSYM algorithm will check for the possible presence of higher space-group symmetry. The results of all these checks will be mailed to you in a single summary report.

printcif

This will take your CIF and apply the typesetting software used by the journal office to generate a preprint of your paper. You will get a faithful representation of how the paper will be created - a valuable feature if you're not quite sure how to obtain some desired effect. The preprint will also indicate any data values which the editorial staff would query - for instance, missing Commission requirements, physical values that are or may be unreasonable - giving you an opportunity to forestall such queries! If you don't want this extra feature, put the word "PROOF" in the Subject line of your e-mail (not in the message itself!).

You should receive the results as two e-mail messages - one reporting a successful outcome and sometimes containing other information; and a PostScript file of the preprint. If the software is unable to generate a preprint, the diagnostic message alone is returned, with some indication of the reason for failure. It is usually sensible to check your CIF first with the checkcif utility before submitting it to printcif. We regret that at this stage only a PostScript version of the preprint is provided. If you experience any problems in using these utilities, please contact me (bm@iucr.ac.uk) or M. Hoyland (mh@iucr.ac.uk). Happy checking and proofing.

Brian McMahon
Research & Development Officer, IUCr