----- Brief description and the background of SPTOOL -----

SPTOOL is a collection of softwares which have been developed and 
used for my astronomical research work in the field of 
stellar spectroscopy. The largest and most important "control tower" 
program is "SPSHOW", which provides GUI opportunities of line-
identification, measuring equivalent widths, simulating theoretical 
spectra, and preparing input data for other application programs 
(e.g., such as the well-known WIDTH program originally written 
by Dr. Kurucz for abundance determination but considerably modified 
in many respects, or the automatic profile-fitting program MPFIT
developed by myself).  All program are written in Fortran and
run in 32 bit MS Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP and Windows Vista/7
(though not yet well tested).

Originally, this had long been nothing but a miscellaneous collection 
of softwares restricted to my personal use only. However, in response 
to the desire of some of my Japanese colleagues, I decided to put 
these into their disposal, giving effort to make these programs 
more convenient and user-friendly. This actually turned out to be a 
good motivation for further improving the functions/usefulness of 
the programs. Consequently, SPTOOL has so far been used among 
a small group of several Japanese astronomers, and a few papers 
have been gradually produced describing results obtained by using 
this software. 

One problem is, however, that there is currently no other way 
than mentioning  "Takeda (private communication)" in quoting 
the use of this software when writing papers. Evidently, it is not fair 
to publicize results derived from a tool which is locally closed.
So, I have been feeling the necessity of disclosing its some details.
Timely, we Japanese group have very recently published
in PASJ (2005, Vol. 57, No. 1) a series of papers, in which
SPTOOL was extensively used in deriving the results. 
Taking this good opportunity, I decided to place this software
in the public domain with some documents written in English, 
so that sufficient information may be provided concerning 
how our analysis was performed. 

Finally, there is one thing that should inevitably be mentioned.
Many (if not all)  of the programs contained in SPTOOL are
heavily based on the subroutines written by Dr. R. L. Kurucz
(more specifically, ATLAS9/WIDTH9 programs). As a matter of fact,
in SPTOOL programs, his source codes are extensively used almost 
unchanged (e.g., interpolation routines, opacity routines, 
radiative transfer routines) or greatly modified/extended 
(e.g., WIDTH program). I could not have done anything if his 
precious programs were not at my hand. In this sense, I am greatly 
indebted to Dr. Kurucz. Since I have long been respecting
his open-minded attitude in providing his softwares, 
I have also made open all the Fortran source codes of my programs,
following his generous open-source policy.

Appendix: Files to Download

Files you find in this directory are as follows.
1. readme.1st    (this file)
2. sptool_xp2000.zip (main programs and data: for Windows XP or earlier)
3. sptool_vista7.zip (main programs and data: for Windows Vista or 7)
4. testdata.zip  (sample data files for test runs: zip-compressed)
5. manual_e.pdf  (draft of user manual: still incomplete)

Please download either 2 or 3 depending on your environment
and follow the installation instruction decribed in manual_e.pdf.

There still remains some work of configuring the environmental
variables. See manual_e.pdf for details.


Yoichi Takeda (NAOJ)
E-mail: takeda.yoichi@nao.ac.jp