[SciPy-User] ANN: Veusz 1.15

[Jeremy Sanders]

For possible interest to members of this mailing list...

Veusz 1.15
----------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

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 1.15:
 * Improved hatching:
    - More hatch styles
    - Adjust spacing of hatching
    - Change hatching line style
    - Allow hatching background color
 * Axes will not extend beyond specified min and max values
 * Add options to extend axes by 2, 5, 10 and 15% of data range
 * Ctrl+MouseWheel zooms in and out of plot
 * Full screen graph view mode
 * New dataset plugins
    - Linear interpolation
    - Cumulative value
    - Rolling average
    - Subtract mean / minimum
 * Allow grid widgets to be placed in grid widgets
 * Catch EnvironmentError exceptions on Windows
 * Allow multiple datasets to be selected in dataset browser
 * Allow tagging of datasets and allow datasets be grouped by tags
   in dataset browser
 * Allow text to be written as text in SVG, rather than curves
 * Add DBus interface to program, if DBus is installed
 * 2D QDP support
 * Add setup.py options for packagers
    --veusz-resource-dir : location of data files
    --disable-install-docs
 * Add title option for keys

Minor changes:
 * Use / rather than \ for path separator in saved file names for
   Windows/Unix compatibility
 * Add diamond fill error bar type
 * Add \color and \marker commands to text renderer
 * Support labels on xy datasets if one of x or y datasets missing
 * Reorganise dataset plugin menu
 * Fix links in INSTALL/README
 * Floating point intervals in capture dialog

Bug fixes:
 * Trap case where nan values could be plotted
 * Fix error if website not accessible in exception dialog
 * Crash when min and max of axes are too similar
 * Fix clipping of paths after transform in SVG files
 * Fix crash in picker
 * Fix crash if duplication of characters in CSV date format
 * Fix crash in tool tip in dataset browser
 * Fix GlobalColor error (on certain dark color sets)
 * Fix blocked data import if no descriptor
 * Fix crash if log contours and minimum is zero
 * Bug fix https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=800196

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
 * Vector field plots
 * Box plots
 * Polar plots
 * Ternary plots
 * 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, FITS, NPY/NPZ, QDP, binary and user-plugin importing
 * Data can be captured from external sources
 * User defined functions, constants and can import external Python 
functions
 * Plugin interface to allow user to write or load code to
    - import data using new formats
    - make new datasets, optionally linked to existing datasets
    - arbitrarily manipulate the document
 * Data picker
 * Interactive tutorial
 * Multithreaded rendering

Requirements for source install:
 Python (2.4 or greater required)
   http://www.python.org/
 Qt >= 4.4 (free edition)
   http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/  
 PyQt >= 4.3 (SIP is required to be installed first)
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/sip/
 numpy >= 1.0
   http://numpy.scipy.org/

Optional:
 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/
 PyMinuit >= 1.1.2 (optional improved fitting)
   http://code.google.com/p/pyminuit/
 For EMF and better SVG export, PyQt >= 4.6 or better is
   required, to fix a bug in the C++ wrapping
 dbus-python, for dbus interface
   http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-python/

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. Please also see and contribute
to the Veusz wiki: http://barmag.net/veusz-wiki/

Issues with the current version:

 * Some recent versions of PyQt/SIP will causes crashes when exporting
   SVG files. Update to 4.7.4 (if released) or a recent snapshot to
   solve this problem.

If you enjoy using Veusz, we 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 Git repository
at https://github.com/jeremysanders/veusz.git.