By the energy-coincidence method it is possible to obtain the k-space locations of direct transitions contributing to photoemission spectra. Without a tunable UV-radiation source, however, only some few points are accessible along high symmetry lines. With synchrotron radiation, on the other hand, band structure determinations have mostly been perfomed assuming a particular final-state dispersion, e.g., the free-electron parabola, and restricted to normal emission. Due to the final-state approximation only critical points (with extremal behaviour of the bands) are unambigously determined.We have performed a least-square fit of a Hodges-Ehrenreich-Lang interpolation scheme to experimentally determined initial-states of Ni from different kinds of measurements. From the band structure obtained in this way, structure plots (energy vs. emission angle) for mirror-plane emission from low-index Ni surfaces have been made. These structure plots are based on free-electron-like final-state dispersion, but by allowing the final-state to have a certain width it is possible to find structures that are rather independent of the final-state dispersion. Using the corresponding measured structures for a refined fit of the interpolation scheme parameters, we have got a semi-empirical band structure for Ni giving a good overall agreement with the measured angle-dispersed spectra. It is also shown how the structure plots can be used to determine the accuracy of energy-coincidence measurements.