Veusz 1.5 --------- Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith ----------------------------- http://home.gna.org/veusz/ Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2009 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy@jeremysanders.net> Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater). Veusz is a Qt4 based scientific plotting package. It is written in Python, using PyQt4 for display and user-interfaces, and numpy for handling the numeric data. Veusz is designed to produce publication-ready Postscript/PDF output. The user interface aims to be simple, consistent and powerful. Veusz provides a GUI, command line, embedding and scripting interface (based on Python) to its plotting facilities. It also allows for manipulation and editing of datasets. Changes in 1.5: * EMF export (requires pyemf and PyQt snapshot) * Character encodings supported in data import * Rewritten stylesheet handling. User can now set defaults in document for all settings. This is now under the Edit->Default Styles dialog. * A default stylesheet can be loaded for all new documents (set in preferences dialog) * Linked datasets saved in documents now use relative filename paths (with absolute paths as fallback) * Axes can now have text labels of points plotted along them (choose "labels" as axis mode) * Dataset points can be scaled to different sizes according to another dataset (this is the "Scale markers" option for point plotters) More minor changes * Custom delimiter support in CSV data importer * Add SetDataText and support text in GetData in command API * \dot and \bar added to LaTeX renderer * Option to change icon sizes displayed * Rearrange toolbar icons and create data and widget operation toolbars * Zoom button remembers previous usage * Conversion from 1D->2D datasets more robust * Expression datasets can now be a constant value * Uses colors form theme better and allow user to change some UI colors in preferences * Fix contours if coordinates can be infinite (e.g. log scaling with zero value) * nan/inf are no longer ignored when the ignore text option is selected in import dialog * Several other minor UI changes and bugfixes Important note * As the way defaults are used has been rewritten, default values are no longer saved on a per-user basis but are saved in a stylesheet and is saved in the document. You cannot currently set defaults on a widget- name basis. Features of package: * X-Y plots (with errorbars) * Line and function plots * Contour plots * Images (with colour mappings and colorbars) * Stepped plots (for histograms) * Bar graphs * Plotting dates * Fitting functions to data * Stacked plots and arrays of plots * Plot keys * Plot labels * Shapes and arrows on plots * LaTeX-like formatting for text * EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG/EMF export * Scripting interface * Dataset creation/manipulation * Embed Veusz within other programs * Text, CSV and FITS importing Requirements: Python (2.4 or greater required) http://www.python.org/ Qt >= 4.3 (free edition) http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/ PyQt >= 4.3 (SIP is required to be installed first) http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/ http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/ numpy >= 1.0 http://numpy.scipy.org/ Optional: Microsoft Core Fonts (recommended for nice output) http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ PyFITS >= 1.1 (optional for FITS import) http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits pyemf >= 2.0.0 (optional for EMF export) http://pyemf.sourceforge.net/ For EMF export, PyQt-x11-gpl-4.6-snapshot-20090906 or better is required, to fix a bug in the C++ wrapping For documentation on using Veusz, see the "Documents" directory. The manual is in pdf, html and text format (generated from docbook). Issues with the current version: * Due to Qt, hatched regions sometimes look rather poor when exported to PostScript, PDF or SVG. * Clipping of data does not work in the SVG export as Qt currently does not support this. * Due to a bug in Qt, some long lines, or using log scales, can lead to very slow plot times under X11. This problem is seen with dashed/dotted lines. It is fixed by upgrading to Qt-4.5.1 (the Veusz binary version includes this Qt version). Switching off antialiasing in the options may help this. If you enjoy using Veusz, I would love to hear from you. Please join the mailing lists at https://gna.org/mail/?group=veusz to discuss new features or if you'd like to contribute code. The latest code can always be found in the SVN repository. Jeremy Sanders