MTEX does not import all not indexed points from TSL .ang files

[Tom-G-Uni-Vienna]

Dear All, I though I should mention something now, instead of waiting till the MTEX Workshop to tell you about it!

When importing EBSD data from TSL .ang files, the "truly" not indexed points (not just points with poor statistics, but points where no solution was found) are thrown away by MTEX and not imported. Thus, they are not available to be processes as notIndexed points and just appear as holes in the map. This is a problem if you scan something with e.g. gas bubbles in the microstructure, where there is no chance of any kind of EBSD pattern generation. Later, during grain reconstruction, grains "expand" into these empty holes in the map, and the image quality data for the deleted points is also lost.

The code that does the deleting is on lines 74 and 75 of the file loadHelper.m , found in mtex-5.10.2/interfaces/tools:

% eliminate rows where angle is 4*pi
ind = abs(data(:,cols(1))*dg-4*pi)<1e-3;
data(ind,:) = [];

I would like these "error" points still to be imported and be available as notIndexed points , at the very least optionally.

To combat this problem I usually modify the loadHelper.m file at the quoted lines to instead convert the three Euler angles to 0 radians (as a placeholder), and remove the line that deletes the points. This gets me what I want - the points are imported, and their associated (very bad) "quality" statistics like fit, confidence index etc allow me to set them to notIndexed during cleaning of the map. e.g.

% DON'T eliminate rows where angle is 4*pi  
ind = abs(data(:,cols(1))*dg-4*pi)<1e-3;
data(ind,cols(1))=0;
data(ind,cols(2))=0;
data(ind,cols(3))=0;

I am sure the MTEX developers can come up with a more elegant solution! I don't know the reason for the original code - perhaps it was never imagined the user might want to see these points, or perhaps having Euler angles of 4*pi leads to errors, so these have to be removed?

best regards and huge thanks for developing MTEX! Tom Griffiths