VESTA crashes when importing .xsf file

[Ingrid Joylyn Paredes]

Hi,

I am having trouble importing an .xsf file into VESTA. I am hoping to import the file to export a .cif file for powder diffraction analysis. 

When I import the file, I get an error that says, "Unhandled exception: An unhandled exception occurred. Press "Abort" to terminate the program. "Retry" to exit the program normally and "Ignore" to try to continue." Hitting "Ignore" does not do anything. I have already tried removing and redownloading the latest version of VESTA.

Could anyone advise on how to solve this issue?

Thank you!

[matthieu verstraete]

Hello Ingrid and everyone,

I am having a similar problem with xsf files generated by the octopus program: vesta crashes immediately upon reading them (just installed the latest VESTA this morning). The files are readable by xcrysden, so they should be "legal" xsf. 

The specificity is that they are for molecules (benzene attached) and there is a set of basis vectors for the data grid, but not for the crystal cell. If I add an artificial unit cell to the xsf file, it works. 

In passing, it would be great if VESTA became open source - we could do a lot of this debugging ourselves. Is there some explanation for the closed source / open binary philosophy?

Best, and thanks for a great program

Matthieu