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Thermo Finnigan RAW

Thermo .raw support is provided by opentfraw, a pure-Rust reader that parses the Finnigan trailer-and-index layout directly. No Thermo .NET runtime, no RawFileReader.dll.

Detection

A path is treated as Thermo when:

  • the filename ends in .raw (case-insensitive), and
  • the path is a regular file (not a directory - that is Waters).

Covered features

  • Multi-controller files (MS, PDA, UV, analog).
  • Centroided and profile spectra.
  • Scan-trailer fields: scan filter line, master scan, precursor m/z, isolation width, collision energy, polarity, MS level, analyzer.
  • Indexed mzML output with native-id format Thermo nativeID format.

Known gaps

  • Some experimental scan modes (SIM, MRM with non-linear quad) are exposed as plain SpectrumRecord without specialized CV terms.
  • The software element in mzML reports opentfraw <version> rather than Xcalibur. This is intentional: it identifies the tool that actually wrote the file.

Tested instruments

The conformance suite exercises Thermo Q Exactive UHMR, Q Exactive HF-X, Orbitrap Fusion Lumos, and Exploris 480 corpora. See the opentfraw repository for the full matrix.

See also