Home Page for DRAWxtl

Releases V4.5 & V5.5 are now available.

Please reference program DRAWxtl as follows: Larry W. Finger, Martin Kroeker, and Brian H. Toby, DRAWxtl, an open-source computer program to produce crystal-structure drawings, J. Applied Crystallography V40, pp. 188-192, 2007. An electronic reprint is available here.

The program DRAWxtl is the result of the collaboration of Larry W. Finger , retired from the Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, DC, Martin Kroeker , Institut für Anorganische und Analytische Chemie, Universität Freiburg, Germany, and Brian Toby , Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, USA.

The purpose of this program is to display crystal structures on ordinary computer hardware and operating systems. Four forms of graphics are produced: (1) an openGL window for immediate viewing, (2) the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer (POV-RAY) scene language for publication-quality drawings, (3) the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) for dissemination across the Internet, and (4) a Postscript rendering of the OpenGL window for those that want high-quality output but do not have POV-RAY installed.

DRAWxtl runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11, Mac (OS X), Linux, other Unix-type systems. and openVMS. No special graphics hardware is required.

The current program is an outgrowth of a former version named crystal that was written by Finger for the proprietary hardware and software of Advanced Visualization System.

The other pages of this Web site outline the features of this program, demonstrate its capabilities, and offer an opportunity to download this free software, which is available for most platforms. To see the changes implemented in the new version, click here . A free download is also available.

Please send comments to Larry Finger , Martin Kroeker , or Brian Toby .