This software was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology by employees of the Federal Government in the course of their official duties. Pursuant to title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code this software is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain. NISTMonte is an experimental system. NIST assumes no responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guarantees, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic. We would appreciate acknowledgement if the software is used. This software can be redistributed and/or modified freely provided that any derivative works bear some notice that they are derived from it, and any modified versions bear some notice that they have been modified.
Version 3α is a preview version containing many recent improvements to NISTMonte. Version 3α has a number of bug fixes and functionality improvements but is not as well documented nor as well tested as previous versions. Scripts from previous versions are likely to require modification particularly to address changes in the EDS detector model. While it is possible to determine the necessary modifications from the provided documentation (JavaDoc) the task will require some patience.
NISTMonte version 3α requires the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 6.0 or more recent. The Java run time environment is available for free from Sun.
Version 2 is the most recent version of NISTMonte and is recommended for most users. The primary differences between version 1 and 2 are the addition of new detectors, the refactoring of the x-ray detection code and a new easier-to-use mechanism for changing physical models.
NISTMonte version 2 requires the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 or more recent. The Java run time environment is available for free from Sun.
Version 1 was introduced at the 2005 Microscopy and Microanalysis Meeting. Version 1 has been superceded by version 2 for almost all requirements.
NISTMonte version 1 requires the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 1.4 or higher.
Note: Java versioning is a little confusing. Version 1.4 was followed by version 5.0 which you will occasionally see called version 1.5.
The Java run time environment is available for free from Sun.
Installation for Windows is simplified by an installation script. Download and run "NIST Monte Setup.exe". The installer will copy the programs and documentation into "c:\Program Files\NIST\EPQ". Links will be created on the "Start" menu in a folder called NISTMonte for the documentation, the source code and the executable files. If you don't have a suitable Java run-time environment installed then the installer will attempt to download one for you.
Installing NISTMonte is more complicated on other operating systems. First download the package NISTMonte.zip which contains source code, documentation and executable JAR files in a ZIP format. Unpack this file using JAR, the Java Archive Tool which can be found in the Java JDK. The syntax is
jar xf NISTMonte.zip
This will recreate the directory structure found in the ZIP file in your current directory. You can then move the files and directories into the appropriate locations for your operating system. Finally, you may want to create links to the various documentation and executable files. Assuming that your working directory contains the JAR files in the NISTMonte package, then a command line for the JythonGUI that works for me in the KDE 3.5.1 environment in SUSE Linux 10.1 is:
java -mx256m -jar JythonGUI.jar&
The -mx256m option increases the memory available to the process
to 256 MB. This has proven sufficient for all the scripts I've run. I expect
that something similar will work on Solaris, OS X or other Linux distributions.
This assumes that all the necessary JAR files (those provided) are located in
the same directory as JythonGUI.jar and that the current working directory
is the directory in which JythonGUI.jar is located.
I've created a link on my KDE desktop and in my KDE menu for the JythonGUI. You can also create links to the HTML documentation (index.html in the 'doc' directory) and to the various different PDF files.
Finally, there are a number of example Jython script in the directory Jython. Open these using JythonGUI and use these, as described on the scripting page, as the basis for your own scripts. You may have to make a couple of minor changes to paths and the like to make them appropriate for your operating system.