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A Better Crystal Viewer

ABCV is a python-based crystal viewer built upon the popular pymatgen and fresnel libraries. By leveraging pymatgen, ABCV supports a range of popular input/output files associated with common quantum chemistry codes. Furthermore, various transformations and analysis tools are provided by pymatgen that makes preparing images with ABCV a snap. ABCV attempts to be fully customizable by utilizing the fresnel library, which provides a range features for creating publication-quality images.

Below are a selection of images generated with ABCV.

A simple example utilizing ABCV is shown below.

from abcv import Viewer
from pymatgen import Structure

# load the logo structure with pymatgen
struct = Structure.from_file('test_files/POSCAR.logo')

# instantiate the ABCV Viewer
viewer = Viewer(struct)

# generate scene and set background color to white (in RGBA)
viewer.generate_scene(background_color=(1., 1., 1., 1.))

# save the image
viewer.save_image('test.png')

ABCV also comes with a command-line interface. The above code is essentially equivalent to running the following.

$ abcv --save test.png test_files/POSCAR.logo

For now, documentation can be accessed from the docstring of each object. Extensive online documentation will be provided in the future.

Presently, there are two methods for installing ABCV. In the future, we plan to provide a package on conda-forge for installation.

To install via docker, first clone the repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/mturiansky/abcv && cd abcv/

Next, build the docker image.

$ docker build -t abcv:v0.0.1 .

You are now ready to run the container.

$ docker run --rm -it abcv:v0.0.1 bash

Within the container, one can access ABCV with the $ abcv command or as a library (from abcv import Viewer). To use the interactive GUI, you need to run the docker container with the following command.

$ docker run --rm --volume="$HOME/.Xauthority:/home/user/.Xauthority:rw" --env="DISPLAY" --net=host -it abcv:v0.0.1 bash

To install via pip, you first need to install fresnel (tip: you may need to manually install qhull if you don't use the conda-forge package). Next, you simply need to run the following command (preferably within a virtual environment).

$ pip install git+https://github.com/mturiansky/abcv

We would be happy to accept contributions from other developers. There is still much work to do to implement various convenience features. All contributed code should conform to pep8 standards.