ANN: Veusz 0.5 - a scientific plotting package

[Jeremy Sanders]

Veusz 0.5
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Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
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http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2005 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy at jeremysanders.net>
Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater)

Veusz is a scientific plotting package written in Python (currently
100% Python). It uses PyQt for display and user-interfaces, and
numarray for handling the numeric data. Veusz is designed to produce
publication-ready Postscript output.

Veusz provides a GUI, command line and scripting interface (based on
Python) to its plotting facilities. The plots are built using an
object-based system to provide a consistent interface.

Changes from 0.4:
 Installation:
  * distutils used to install the package. RPMS available.
 Plotting:
  * Different error bar styles (diamond, curve...)
  * "Matched" axes, with the same scale on each
  * Data can be linked from external files instead of embedded in
    document
  * Filled regions under/over functions or xy plots
  * Improved function clipping near edge of plot
  * Default values can be set for settings, which are remembered
    between sessions (e.g. blue points for xy3).
  * Rotated text labels
  * Improved fitting, giving results from chi2, etc..
 UI:
  * Can move around widgets and delete them
  * Exception dump dialog to send bug reports
  * Improved import dialog help
  * Propagate settings between widgets
  * Window positions are saved between sessions	
 Reading data:
  * Better error handling when reading data
 + Numerous bug fixes

Features of package:
 * X-Y plots (with errorbars)
 * Stepped plots (for histograms)
 * Line plots
 * Function plots
 * Fitting functions to data
 * Stacked plots and arrays of plots
 * Plot keys
 * Plot labels
 * LaTeX-like formatting for text
 * EPS output
 * Simple data importing
 * Scripting interface
 * Save/Load plots

To be done:
 * Contour plots
 * Images
 * UI improvements
 * Import filters (for qdp and other plotting packages, fits, csv)
 * Data manipulation
 * Python embedding interface (for embedding Veusz in other programs).
   [some of the external interface is complete]

Requirements:
 Python (probably 2.3 or greater required)
   http://www.python.org/
 Qt (free edition)
   http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/  
 PyQt (SIP is required to be installed first)
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/
 numarray
   http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray
 Microsoft Core Fonts (recommended)
   http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

For documentation on using Veusz, see the "Documents" directory. The
manual is in pdf, html and text format (generated from docbook).

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
newest code can always be found in CVS.

Cheers

Jeremy