ANN: Veusz 1.7

[Jeremy Sanders]

Veusz 1.7
---------
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 1.7:
 * Widgets can be moved by dragged and dropped in the widget tree, or copied
   by holding down ctrl at the same time
 * Tick labels are centred if possible at the start and ends of axes
 * When putting graphs in grid, axis labels and tick labels are placed
   in much better positions
 * Embedding module is shipped in binary versions
 * Grid lines can be drawn on axis minor ticks
 * Contour widget can draw minor (dotted) contours between main contours
 * Logarithmic contours have proper logarithmic spacing
 * Fixes for widget names and dataset names with Unicode characters, 
including
   copy and paste
 * Optional smoothing in the image widget

Minor changes:
 * Errors in evaluating expressions are logged in the console window, and
   do not show exceptions
 * Fix problems when importing multiple symbols from python modules in the
   custom import dialog
 * Use minus sign for negative numbers in tick labels, rather than hyphens
 * Contour widget lines can have transparency
 * Datasets are sorted by name when writing to saved document
 * Use correct status for paste button when starting application
 * Add option for extra space between axes and tick labels, and axis labels
 * Preference added for background color of exported bitmaps
 * Add IsClosed() and WaitForClose() embedding functions to check whether 
plot
   window is closed, or to wait for closing of plot window.

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
 * User defined functions, constants and can import external Python 
functions

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.