BLANC : The program suite for protein crystallography

The BLANC program suite is a set of programs which can be used for macromolecular structure determination by X-ray crystallography. The suite is designed to provide experienced crystallographers and students with a number of simple tools, at the same time allowing the building and testing of new algorithms. Besides a set of small programs, the BLANC system introduces so-called superprograms which represent larger programs composed of several smaller ones. They utilize the so-called black-box principle, requiring minimum preparation or intervention from a user. The programs are written in standard Fortran77 and communicate with each other by the standard BLANC data files. The package has been ported to all the major platforms such as UNIX, VMS and DOS. A current version of the suite is distributed by anonymous ftp.