 ____       __  ______  _       _      PYXPLOT
|  _ \ _   _\ \/ /  _ \| | ___ | |_    Version 0.5.7
| |_) | | | |\  /| |_) | |/ _ \| __|   26/08/2006
|  __/| |_| |/  \|  __/| | (_) | |_
|_|    \__, /_/\_\_|   |_|\___/ \__|   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>

-----

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 the shared interface, however, PyXPlot is intended to
significantly improve upon the quality of gnuplot's output, producing
publication-quality figures. The commandline interface has also been extended,
providing a wealth of new features, and short-cuts for some operations which
were felt to be excessively cumbersome in the original.

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 results of
which PyXPlot is capable can be seen on the PyXPlot website:
<http://www.srcf.ucam.org/pyxplot/>.

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)
convert  (ImageMagick; needed for the gif, png and jpg terminals)

The following package is not required for installation, but it is not possible
to use the X11 terminal, i.e. to display plots on screen, without it:

gv       (Ghostview; used for the X11 terminal)

3. INSTALLATION

To install, type:

./configure
make
make 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/pyxplot/>.

----
Dominic Ford
