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

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2007 Jeremy Sanders <[email protected]>
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.

 

[Wildemar Wildenburger]

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

[snip]

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.

Not that I don't value your effort, but why another plotting package
while we have pyx and matplotlib already?

/W

 

[Jeremy Sanders]

Not that I don't value your effort, but why another plotting package
while we have pyx and matplotlib already?

In addition to the Python based scripting command line and embedding
interface, it has a powerful graphical user interface for constructing
plots and importing data. Neither matplotlib or pyx have this.
This is the main feature. It was originally intended to be mainly
command-line based, but I've found the GUI to be my main way of using it.

At the time of the first release of Veusz, and for quite long after,
matplotlib was too primitive to use as a backend for Veusz (see previous
threads on this subject). Maybe that has changed now, but IMHO Veusz output
still looks better.

Jeremy

 

[Wildemar Wildenburger]

In addition to the Python based scripting command line and embedding
interface, it has a powerful graphical user interface for constructing
plots and importing data. Neither matplotlib or pyx have this.
This is the main feature. It was originally intended to be mainly
command-line based, but I've found the GUI to be my main way of using it.

At the time of the first release of Veusz, and for quite long after,
matplotlib was too primitive to use as a backend for Veusz (see previous
threads on this subject). Maybe that has changed now, but IMHO Veusz output
still looks better.

Jeremy

Oh, OK. I though it was a library. I now see that it is an actual
application. Sorry to have bothered you

Good luck with that!


/W

 

[Jeremy Sanders]

Oh, OK. I though it was a library. I now see that it is an actual
application. Sorry to have bothered you

It's a library too