Question: How can I read images in format ABC ? What file formats does EMAN support ?
Answer: EMAN supports a lot of different formats, and it does it transparently. That is, in general, all EMAN program can read any image in a wide variety of formats without you having to do anything special. EMAN currently supports reading SPIDER, IMAGIC, MRC, HDF5,Gatan DM2, Gatan DM3, PIF and ICOS formats. TIFF images are now natively supported using libtiff. You should now be able to directly read 16 bit tiffs. Most generic image formats like TIFF, GIF, PGM, BMP, PNG, etc. are also supported if you have the IMAGEMAGICK package installed on your machine. Due to Gatan constantly changing things, we cannot guarentee that DM3 file reading will be perfect.
For image writing, EMAN supports most of the above formats as well. However, most EMAN programs default to IMAGIC format (for 2D) and MRC format (for 3D). To convert to a different format, use 'proc2d' for 2D images and 'proc3d' for 3D images. EMAN will detect most filename extensions automatically, or you can force several of the output formats with a program option.
Some of you may also be aware of the 'byte ordering' issue. Different machines (SGI vs Intel, for example) store their numbers in the opposite byte-order. Often this means files generated on one machine will be unreadable on machines using the opposite convention. However, EMAN handles this problem as well. Any supported image can be read regardless of byte-order. When writing images EMAN uses the native byte order of the machine the software is being run on.