4DAO Cookbook

4DAO is a FORTRAN code designed to launch automatically DAOSPEC (Stetson & Pancino 2008) for a large sample of spectra. The main aims of 4DAO are: (1) to allow an analysis cascade of a list of spectra provided in input, by automatically writing the input DAOSPEC files and managing its output files; (2) to optimize automatically some spectral parameters used by DAOSPEC in the process of equivalent width measurement, above all the Full Width Half Maximum; (3) to mask some spectral regions (telluric lines, interstellar features, photospheric lines with prominent Lorenztian wings) that can bias the correct equivalent width measurement; (4) to provide suitable graphical tools in order to evaluate the quality of the solution, especially of the Gaussian fit to each individual spectral line; (5) to provide the final normalized, zero radial velocity spectra.