International
Tables for Crystallography Volume A Space-group symmetry Edited by Th. Hahn © International Union of Crystallography 2006 |
International Tables for Crystallography (2006). Vol. A, Foreword to the Fifth, Revised Edition.
Foreword to the Fifth, Revised EditionaInstitut für Kristallographie, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, D-52056 Aachen, Germany |
Six years ago, in 1995, the Fourth Edition of Volume A appeared, followed by corrected reprints in 1996 and 1998. A list of corrections and innovations in the Fourth Edition was published in Acta Cryst. (1995). A51, 592–595 .
The present Fifth Edition is much more extensively revised than any of its predecessors, even though the casual reader may not notice these changes. In keeping with the new millennium, the production of this edition has been completely computer-based. Although this involved an unusually large amount of effort at the start, it will permit easy and flexible modifications, additions and innovations in the future, including a possible electronic version of the volume. In the past, all corrections had to be done by `cut-and-paste' work based on the printed version of the book.
The preparation of this new edition involved the following steps:
The following scientific innovations of the Fifth Edition are noteworthy, apart from corrections of known errors and flaws; these changes will again be published in Acta Cryst. Section A.
It is my pleasure to thank all those authors who have contributed new programs or sections or who have substantially revised existing articles: M. I. Aroyo (Sofia), H. Burzlaff (Erlangen), B. Gruber (Praha), E. Koch (Marburg), P. B. Konstantinov (Sofia), U. Müller (Marburg), H. Wondratschek (Karlsruhe) and H. Zimmermann (Erlangen). I am indebted to S. E. Barnes and N. J. Ashcroft (Chester) for the careful and dedicated technical editing of this volume. Finally, I wish to express my sincere thanks to K. Stróż (Katowice) for his extensive checking of the data in the space-group tables using his program SPACER [J. Appl. Cryst. (1997), 30, 178–181 ], which has led to several subtle improvements in the present edition.
Aachen, November 2001