Conversion of PDZ to CSV file format

[javablack95]

Hey all, thanks for a very useful application. I wanted to know if there was a standalone script which could convert .PDZ file format to .CSV format. Thank you.

[leedrake5]

I've wondered the same thing myself @javablack95. The problems are:

1. PDZ files are written in binary - I have been reasonably successful at finding where and how the spectrum is stored, but a lot of the relevant metadata is inaccessible (at least until I find someone who is better at C+ than me).
2. There is more than one kind of PDZ file, and they are not all mutually compatible. For example, PDZ version 25 released in 2016 stores data in different (and variable) places compared to version 24, which was predominant between 2010-2016. The software to convert version 24 PDZ files to csv (S1PXRF) won't accept version 25 files, as just one example. To the user, they have no idea which software is compatible with which PDZ files.

An additional difficulty is normalization - spectra from CSV files are stored after being normalized to livetime (e.g. when the detector was actively collecting photons) - I found early on this eliminated compatibility problems for different assay times. However, because I can't find livetime in PDZ files, I instead use the strobe peak (an artificial peak around 0.4 eV used to calibrate energies) - but that is fundamentally a product of duration (I think it's 100 counts per second, but ca't remember).

Anyway, those are the challenges to PDZ files. I've noticed the R package I wrote to import them is no longer working well - I will see if I can't resolve some of these issues when revisiting these data types.