ANN: Veusz 1.6

[Jeremy Sanders]

Veusz 1.6
---------
Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
-----------------------------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2010 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy at 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/SVG 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. Data can be captured from
external sources such as internet sockets or other programs.

Changes in 1.6:
 * User defined constants, functions or external Python imports can be
   defined for use when evaluating expressions.
 * Import descriptor is much more tolerant of syntax, e.g. "x,+- y,+,-" can
   now be specified as "x +- y + -".
 * New SVG export (PyQt >= 4.6). Supports clipping and exports text
   as paths for full WYSIWYG.
 * Dataset names can now contain any character except "`". Names containing
   non-alphanumeric characters can be quoted in expressions `like so`*1.23
 * Widget names can contain any character except "/"
 * A transparency dataset can be provided to specify the per-pixel
   transparency of the image widget.
 * A polygon widget has been added.
 * There is a new option to place axis ticks outside the plot (outer ticks
   setting on axis widget)
 * Several new line styles have been added.
 * Several new plotting markers have been added.
 * The capture dialog can optionally retain the last N values captured.

Minor changes:
 * Use of flat cap line style for plotting error bars for exactness.
 * Add fixes for saving imported unicode text.
 * Fix image colors for big endian systems (e.g. Mac PPC).
 * Add boxfill error bar style, plotting errors as filled boxes.
 * Positive and negative error bars are forced to have the correct sign.

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
 * Data can be captured from external sources

Requirements for source install:
 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 and better SVG export, PyQt >= 4.6 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). The
examples are also useful documentation.

Issues with the current version:

 * Due to Qt, hatched regions sometimes look rather poor when exported
   to PostScript, PDF or SVG.

 * Due to a bug in Qt, some long lines, or using log scales, can lead
   to very slow plot times under X11. It is fixed by upgrading to
   Qt-4.5.1 (or using a binary). Switching off antialiasing in the options
   may help.

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