ANN: Veusz 1.2.1 - a scientific plotting package / module

[Jeremy Sanders]

Note: the Python embedding interface is now more robust and works under
windows.

Veusz 1.2.1
-----------
Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
-----------------------------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2008 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy at jeremysanders.net>
Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater).

Veusz is a 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.

Change in 1.2.1:
 * Fix crash when adding a key without any key text defined.

Changes in 1.2:
 * Boxes, ellipses, lines, arrows and image files can now be added to
   the plot or page and interactively adjusted.
 * Page sizes, graphs, grids and axes can be interactively adjusted.
 * Plot keys can have multiple columns.
 * Error bars can have cross-ends.

 * Several user interface usability enhancements.

 * Embedding interface has been rewritten to be more robust. It now
   uses multiple processes and sockets.
 * Embedding now works fully on Windows.
 * Embedding interface has been expanded:
    - Zoom width, height and page options for zooming graph to window
    - Dynamically change update interval
    - Move between pages of documents
    - Open up more than one view onto a document

 * PDF export fixed for recent versions of Qt
 * Quite a lot of minor bug fixes
 
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
 * Shapes and arrows on plots
 * LaTeX-like formatting for text
 * EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG 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 >= 4.3 (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

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

Issues:
 * Can be very slow to plot large datasets if antialiasing is enabled.
   Right click on graph and disable antialias to speed up output.

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