richardotis
commented
2 weeks ago The closest thing to a specification for TDB that I'm aware of is this 2014 database manager guide from TC: https://thermocalc.com/wp-content/uploads/Documentation/Archive/2007-2014/V4-1/2014-v4.1-thermo-calc-database-manager-guide.pdf
The format itself has been a moving target over the years; enforcement of what the documentation said has not always been strict, and you can find non-compliant TDBs in the literature that Thermo-Calc happily will parse, or at least used to before TC moved to a more strict parsing scheme with their GES6 module. Much of how PyCalphad's TDB parser works is based on what is in this PDF, combined with whatever real-world TDBs we happen to have collected over time.
This also doesn't touch on the various dialects of TDB supported by, e.g., Matcalc and Pandat.
It would be good to have easy access to a set of documents that describe existing thermodynamic data file formats, such as ChemSage and TDB. I have a PDF copy of chapter 18 of the ChemSage handbook, but nothing on TDB. Please make such documents available if you have them.
Once we have such information, where should we store them? I am usually hesitant to store large binary files in Git. Perhaps I can create a Zotero library and share it with everyone, so that we can store literature files and data format documentation.