 ____       __  ______  _       _      PYXPLOT
|  _ \ _   _\ \/ /  _ \| | ___ | |_    Version 0.5.2
| |_) | | | |\  /| |_) | |/ _ \| __|   14/06/2006
|  __/| |_| |/  \|  __/| | (_) | |_
|_|    \__, /_/\_\_|   |_|\___/ \__|   Copyright (C) 2006 Dominic Ford
       |___/

With thanks to Joerg Lehmann and Andre Wobst for writing PyX, and to
Ross Church for his many helpful suggestions along the way.

Send comments, bug reports, feature requests and coffee supplies to:
<dcf21@mrao.cam.ac.uk>

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1. INTRODUCTION

PyXPlot is a commandline graphing package, which, for ease of use, has an
interface based heavily upon that of gnuplot -- perhaps UNIX's most widely-used
plotting package. Despite sharing its interface, however, it is intended to
significantly improve upon the quality of gnuplot's output, producing
publication-quality figures. In addition, the interface has been extended
beyond that used by the original, providing a wealth of new features, and
making some operations, which were felt by the author to be excessively
cumbersome in the original, easier to use.

The motivation behind PyXPlot's creation was the apparent lack of a free
plotting package which combined both high-quality output and a simple
interface.  Some -- pgplot for one -- provided very attractive output, but
required a program to be written each time a plot was to be produced -- a
potentially time consuming task. Others, gnuplot being the prime example, were
quick and simple to use, but produced less attractive results.

PyXPlot attempts to fill that gap, offering the best of both worlds. Though the
interface is based upon that of gnuplot, text is now rendered with all of the
beauty and flexibility of the LaTeX typesetting environment; the multiplot
environment is made massively more flexible, making it easy to produce
galleries of plots; and the range of possible output formats is extended -- to
name but a few of the enhancements. A number of examples of the kinds of
results of which PyXPlot is capable can be seen on the PyXPlot website:
<http://www.srcf.ucam.org/gnuplotplus/>.

2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

PyXPlot is presently only supported for Linux. It requires that the following
software packages (not included) be installed:

bash     (The bash shell)
python   (Version 2.4 or later)
scipy    (Python Scientific Library)
latex    (Used for all textual labels)
dvips    (Needed to render textual labels)
gs       (Ghostscript; needed for the landscape terminal)
gv       (Ghostview; used for the X11 terminal)
convert  (ImageMagick; needed for the gif, png and jpg terminals)

3. INSTALLATION

To install, type "./install".

4. FURTHER INFORMATION

Full documentation can be found in doc/pyxplot.tex , or in doc/pyxplot.pdf
after installation. This document is alternatively available from the PyXPlot
website: <http://www.srcf.ucam.org/gnuplotplus/>.

----
Dominic Ford
