The usefulness of an X-ray powder diffraction data base, such as the one published by the International Centre for Diffraction Data, is largely dependent on continued additions of indexed powder patterns of single-phase materials of interest to data-base users. The single-phase character of a specimen is generally established by using known values of the unit cell constants to index all its powder pattern lines.

In this manuscript we describe indexing procedures based on crystal data which provide only relative values of the cell dimensions, rather than the absolute values usually considered to be essential to the indexing process. To the best of our knowledge, the use of such data for indexing powder diffraction patterns has generally been overlooked or ignored by X-ray crystallographers. We refer to the large numbers of goniometric measurements of crystals which have been published both before, and since, the discovery of X-ray diffraction. These provide useful descriptions of chemical and physical properties of crystals as well as measurements of relative dimensions of unit cell axes. The latter are presented in the form of a/b, b/b and c/b, together with the interaxial angle or angles, if the cell is nonorthogonal.