X-ray absorption in quantitative x-ray microanalysis of thin specimens may be corrected without knowledge of thickness when the extrapolation method or the differential x-ray absorption (DXA) method is used. However, there is an experimental limitation involved in each method. In this study, a method is proposed to overcome such a limitation. The method is developed by introducing the ζ factor and by combining the extrapolation method and DXA method. The method using the ζ factor, which is called the ζ-DXA method in this study, is applied to diffusion-couple experiments in the Ni-Al system.For a thin specimen where incident electrons are fully transparent, the characteristic x-ray intensity generated from a beam position, I, may be represented as I = (NρW/A)Qωaist.