[SciPy-User] ANN: Veusz 1.10

[Jeremy Sanders]

I'm pleased to announce Veusz 1.10, a Python-based scientific plotting 
package. Please see below for the release notes.

Jeremy


Veusz 1.10
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Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
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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 1.10:
 * Box plot widget added, which can be given statistics to plot or
   calculated from datasets
 * Polar plot widget added
 * Datasets are now easier to construct and edit in the Data->Edit
   dialog box
 * CSV reader will assume a text dataset if it cannot convert first item
   to a number
 * Add color sequence plugin for making a range of widget colors
 * Import plugin for QDP files added
 * Date and times can be also written in local formats
 * Reload data dialog box can reload at intervals and is now non-modal
 * 2D datasets can be created based on expressions of other 2D datasets

Minor changes:
 * Option to change size of ends of error bars
 * Margin size option added for key widget
 * Add --listen option to veusz command to replace veusz_listen.
 * Add --quiet option to run commands without displaying a window
 * Add --export option to export documents to graphics files and exit
 * PNG export compression increased
 * Add option to ignore number of lines after headers in CSV files

Bug fixes:
 * Multiple datasets can now be properly created from dataset plugin dialog
 * X and Y ranges of 2D datasets are now correct when converted from
   X,Y,Z 1D datasets
 * Bounding boxes of resizing rectangles, ellipses and images are fixed
 * min and max coordinate range now works for plotting functions of y
 * Remove duplicate linked files when using import plugins
 * Several crash reports fixed
 * More robust code in data->edit dialog box
 * veusz_listen now works in Windows (not in binary package yet)

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
 * 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 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

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

Issues with the current version:

 * Plots can sometimes be slow using antialiasing. Go to the
   preferences dialog or right click on the plot to disable
   antialiasing.

 * 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, 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