README

Veusz 1.20.1
------------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is a scientific plotting package.  It is designed to produce
publication-ready Postscript, PDF or SVG output. Graphs are built-up
by combining plotting widgets. The user interface aims to be simple,
consistent and powerful.

Veusz provides GUI, Python module, command line, scripting, DBUS and
SAMP interfaces 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 1.20.1:
 * Include free-desktop appdata, MIME and desktop files

Bug fixes:
 * Fix embedding interface (from 1.20)
 * Additional embedding interface fixes for Python 3
 * Fix crash in tutorial if flashing widget deleted
 * Fix polar plot crash with reverse minumum and maximum radii
 * Fix crash when changing range of broken axes interactively
 * Fix object deletion crash in setting menu
 * Check output dataset is not same as an input for histograms

Changes in 1.20:
 * Add HDF5 file data import
 * Allow expressions to be edited for linked 2D datasets
 * Add support for 2D datasets with irregular gridpoints
 * Add 2D data CSV import
 * Allow safe renaming of linked datasets
 * Support importing text from FITS files

Bug fixes:
 * When capturing data from a file/named pipe, do not stop when no
   more data are available
 * Fixes mangling of text in saved files using Windows binary
 * Fix encoding for standard file import
 * Fix FITS import for python3

Features of package:
 Plotting features:
  * 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
  * Nested plots
  * Plot keys
  * Plot labels
  * Shapes and arrows on plots
  * LaTeX-like formatting for text
  * Multiple axes
  * Axes with steps in axis scale (broken axes)
  * Axis scales using functional forms
  * Plotting functions of datasets
 Input and output:
  * EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG/EMF export
  * Dataset creation/manipulation
  * Embed Veusz within other programs
  * Text, HDF5, CSV, FITS, NPY/NPZ, QDP, binary and user-plugin importing
  * Data can be captured from external sources
 Extending:
  * Use as a Python module
  * 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
  * Scripting interface
  * Control with DBUS and SAMP
 Other features:
  * Data picker
  * Interactive tutorial
  * Multithreaded rendering

Requirements for source install:
 Python 2.x (2.6 or greater required) or 3.x (3.3 or greater required)
   http://www.python.org/
 Qt >= 4.7 (free edition)
   http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/
 PyQt >= 4.5 (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 requirements:
 h5py (optional for HDF5 support)
   http://www.h5py.org/
 astropy >= 0.2 or PyFITS >= 1.1 (optional for FITS import)
   http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits
   http://www.astropy.org/
 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/
 dbus-python, for dbus interface
   http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-python/
 astropy (optional for VO table import)
   http://www.astropy.org/
 SAMPy (optional for SAMP support)
   http://pypi.python.org/pypi/sampy/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2014 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy@jeremysanders.net>
 and contributors.
It is licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater).

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: https://github.com/jeremysanders/veusz/wiki

Issues with the current version:

  * Due to a bug in the Qt XML processing, some MathML elements
    containing purely white space (e.g. thin space) will give an error.

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.