ANN: Veusz-0.99.0 - a scientific plotting package

Jeremy Sanders jeremy+complangpythonannounce at jeremysanders.net
Thu May 24 10:00:43 CEST 2007


I am pleased to announce a new beta of a largely rewritten Veusz plotting
package. This now uses Qt4 and numpy, adding support for Windows. Windows
and Linux binaries are provided. For details see below:


Veusz 0.99.0 (new Qt4/numpy beta)
------------
Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
-----------------------------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2007 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy at jeremysanders.net>
Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater).

Veusz is a scientific plotting package 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 from 0.10:
 This is the first release of a much rewritten version of Veusz
 It has been updated to run under Qt4 and numpy, and now supports Windows
 The user interface is also signficantly easier to use

 Other useful features include:
  * Colorbars for images (better color scaling for images too)
  * Grids of graphs with different sized subgraphs
  * Much better import dialog 
  * Antialiased screen output
  * Native PNG and PDF export
  * Separate formatting/properties dialog
  * Handling of INF/NaN in input data
  * Transparency of graphs (not for EPS output)
 Plus many more useful changes (see ChangeLog)

Features of package:
 * X-Y plots (with errorbars)
 * Line and function plots
 * Contour plots
 * Images (with colour mappings and colorbars)
 * Stepped plots (for histograms)
 * Fitting functions to data
 * Stacked plots and arrays of plots
 * Plot keys
 * Plot labels
 * LaTeX-like formatting for text
 * EPS/PDF/PNG export
 * Scripting interface
 * Dataset creation/manipulation
 * Embed Veusz within other programs
 * Text, CSV and FITS importing

Requirements:
 Python (2.3 or greater required)
   http://www.python.org/
 Qt >= 4.1 (free edition)
   http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/  
 PyQt >= 4.1 (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/
 Microsoft Core Fonts (recommended for nice output)
   http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
 PyFITS >= 1.1rc3 (optional for FITS import)
   http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits

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

Issues:
 * This is a new beta, so there are likely to be a number of bugs, even
   though it has been used by a couple of people for some time.
 * Can be very slow to plot large datasets if antialiasing is enabled.
   Right click on graph and disable antialias to speed up output.
 * Some older versions of Qt (<4.2.2) can produce very large postscript
   output and random crashes. This may not be completely resolved
   (especially on windows).
 * The embedding interface appears to crash on exiting.

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


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