This plugin reads and writes XYZ files, a minimalistic plain text format for storing molecular coordinates. A brief summary of the format, as ready by VMD follows:
/* * XYZ molecule file format: * XYZ files are a simple molecule file format suitable for output * by homegrown software since they are very minimalistic. They don't * even include bonding information. * * [ N ] # of atoms, required by this xyz reader plugin * [ molecule name ] name of molecule (can be blank) * atom1 x y z [optional data] atom name followed by xyz coords * atom2 x y z [ ... ] and and (optionally) other data. * ... instead of atom name the atom number in * atomN x y z [ ... ] the PTE can be given. * * Note that this plugin currently ignores everything following the z * coordinate (the optional data fields). */
Trajectories
XYZ files can contain multiple timesteps.
Unused Data
This plugin only reads the label and coordinates for each atom. Any
additional data recorded for an atom is ignored.
Atom Count
VMD requires that the first non-comment line of the file contain the
number of atoms.
Ordinal Numbers
Atoms in an XYZ file can be labeled with either the atom name or ordinal
number.