Early finding of preferred orientation: Applications to direct methods

A recent statistical method for deriving information about the presence of a preferred orientation plane [Altomare, Cascarano, Giacovazzo & Guagliardi (1994). J. Appl. Cryst. 27, 1045-1050] has been revisited. Some implications of the method are theoretically discussed. The method is applied to various practical cases in order to give insight into its potential and its limits and into the correlation between its indications and full-pattern decomposition programs, peak overlapping and data resolution.