ANN: Veusz 1.0 - a scientific plotting package

[Jeremy Sanders]

I'm pleased to announce Veusz 1.0. Source, windows and linux i386 binaries
are available. Jeremy Sanders

Veusz 1.0
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Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
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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.

Feature changes from 0.99.0:
 * Import of Text datasets
 * Labels can be plotted next to X-Y points
 * Numbers can be directly plotted by entering into X-Y datasets as X and Y
 * More line styles
 * Loaded document and functions are checked for unsafe Python features
 * Contours can be labelled with numbers
 * 2D dataset creation to make 2D datasets from x, y, z 1D datasets

Bug and minor fixes from 0.99.0:
 * Zooming into X-Y images works now
 * Contour plots work on datasets with non equal X and Y sizes
 * Various fixes for datasets including NaN or Inf
 * Large changes to data import filter to support loading strings (and dates
   later)
 * Reduce number of undo levels for memory/speed
 * Text renderer rewritten to be more simple
 * Improved error dialogs
 * Proper error dialog for invalid loading of documents

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 >= 4.3 (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/
 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:
 * Reqires a rather new version of PyQt, otherwise dialogs don't work.
 * Can be very slow to plot large datasets if antialiasing is enabled.
   Right click on graph and disable antialias to speed up output.
 * 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.