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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<!--
Quickplot - an interactive 2D plotter
Copyright (C) 1998-2011 Lance Arsenault
This file is part of Quickplot.
Quickplot is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License,
or (at your option) any later version.
Quickplot is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Quickplot. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-->
<html>
<head>
<title>About Quickplot</title>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<style type='text/css'><!--
/* inline the style sheet so it does not get lost */
@STYLE_CSS@
--></style>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<h1>About Quickplot</h1>
</center>
<p style="text-align:center;font-size:x-large;">
a fast interactive 2D plotter
</p>
<p style="text-align:center">
Version @VERSION@ repo version @repo_version@
</p>
<h3>Quickplot Home-page</h3>
<a href="@PACKAGE_URL@">@PACKAGE_URL@</a>
<h3>What is Quickplot?</h3>
<p>
Quickplot is an interactive 2D plotter.
You can very quickly swim through data with Quickplot.
</p>
<h3>What can Quickplot do other 2D plotters can't do?</h3>
<p>
The difference between Quickplot and most 2D plotters is that
the primary purpose of Quickplot is to help you quickly interact with
your data. Of secondary importance is to make a pretty static
picture of your data. Features that distinguish Quickplot
include: unlimited mouse press (pointer move) and
release zooming, mouse grab and slide
(new in version 0.9.0), any number of plots with different scales
displayed at one time, value picking for any number of plots
displayed at one time, and reading data from standard
input (a pipe).
These features become indispensable when you're looking
at data sets with 10,000 to 10,000,000 and more data points. You
can't look at a 2D plot with a million points unless you can quickly
zoom. If you need to look at hundreds of files each with 100,000
or more points Quickplot may save your sanity.
</p>
<p>
Quickplot has lots of command line options that let you
customize your graphs in one line command.
With the Quickplot graphical user interface
(GUI) you can read files and remove buffers,
add and remove plots in graphs, add and remove graphs,
add and remove main windows with any number of graphs,
change individual plot line and point widths,
change colors of lines, points, background and grid,
change graph grid line spacings and line width,
copy and remove graphs, save image files,
rescale, zoom in and out any number of times, grab and move graphs,
examine plotted numbers, and so on.
Quickplot is excellent presenting 2D plots to groups of people
if you would like an interactive and flexible presentation format.
Quickplot can also make png images with translucent colors
(version 0.9.*).
</p>
<p>
In most use cases the command to plot your data is
<span class=code>quickplot FILENAME</span> and Quickplot's default
graphs may be all you need.
</p>
<p>
Quickplot is more like an interactive data <b>browser</b> than an
interactive picture <b>editor</b>.
</p>
<p> All future versions of Quickplot will keep the <em>show me the
data quickly</em> theme. This does not rule out
additions that make Quickplot a more full-featured 2D plotter
that <a href="help.html#house">one can make pretty pictures</a> with.
</p>
<a name="features"></a>
<h3>New features in after version 0.8.*</h3>
<ul>
<li>draws much faster then version 0.8.*
<li>has many more command line options
<li>the new mouse grab and slide with left mouse button is very intuitive
<li>more robust text data file reading
<ul>
<li>better locale support
<li>reads rows with missing number entries
<li>more row comment formats
<li>reads infinity and nan, using nan as a line break
<li>will read any text file and pick out the numbers
<li>reads CSV files
</ul>
<li>Cairo drawing that provides translucent and transparent colors using RGBA
<li>makes graphs with the X11 shape extension that float graphs
on your screen letting you see though them to your other windows
below
<li>has fullscreen draw mode for presentations
<li>reads more sound file formats with newer libsndfile
<li>reads sound files from standard input (pipe input) with newer libsndfile
<li>better double buffer drawing with super quick re-expose redraws,
fixes previous versions slow re-expose redraws
<li>Quickplot is no longer written in C++ so it builds and
installs faster with
less prerequisites
<li>a command line shell (added in version 0.10.*)
</ul>
<h3>Installation prerequisites</h3>
<p>
Quickplot uses the GNU Autotools (./configure) to build and install.
To build Quickplot from the distribution source tarball (example:
<span style="white-space:nowrap">quickplot-@VERSION@.tar.bz2</span>)
the following packages are required to be
installed:
</p>
<ul>
<li><b><a href="http://www.gtk.org/">GTK+</a></b>
has many prerequisites, but they all come with most GNU/Linux
distributions. GTK+ version 3 is required for Quickplot
version @VERSION@.
</li>
<li><b><a href="http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html"
>GNU readline</a></b> allows users to edit command
lines as they are typed in. In addition to standard graphical user
interfaces (GUIs) Quickplot has a
command shell interface that lets you edit all
aspects of Quickplot graphs.
The history and tab auto-completion of readline makes the interactive
version of the Quickplot shell easy to use.
</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/">libsndfile</a></b>
is a C library for reading and writing files containing
sampled sound, such as Ogg/Vorbis, microsoft WAV, and the Apple/SGI AIFF format,
through one standard library interface.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Development prerequisites</h3>
<p>
To build and develop Quickplot from the <a
href="https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=82651">SVN source</a>
the following packages, in addition to the above packages, are
required to be installed:
</p>
<ul>
<li><b>The GNU Autotools</b> <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/">Autoconf</a>, <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/">Automake</a>, and <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/">Libtool</a> are
used to build the Quickplot source.
</li>
<li><b><a
href="http://www.imagemagick.org/">ImageMagick</a></b> The
<em>convert</em> program, from ImageMagick, is used to make xpm images
from PNG images in the Quickplot source.
</li>
<li><b><a href="http://lynx.isc.org/">Lynx</a></b> Lynx is
a fully-featured World Wide Web (WWW) client, or web browser, that can
display inside of a tty terminal. We use Lynx to generate ASCII text
files from our html files, like for example the simple ASCII text
version of this file you are reading now. The text version
of the <em>help</em> page is used to make the man page.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>The name and history of this program</h3>
<p>We call it <em>Lanceman's Quickplot</em> in order to distinguish it
from another program called Quickplot which predates this
program. It used to be on NeXT computers. It may have died
with NeXT.
</p>
<p>This is a complete rewrite, by the original author of the
Lanceman's Quickplot which first appeared in 1998, and managed to find
its way into the <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian GNU/Linux</a>
distribution soon after.
</p>
<p> Quickplot started out in 1998 as an Athena Widgets X11 GUI
(graphical user interface) program. In 2003 it was rewritten as
a <a href="http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/">QT</a> GUI
program. In 2004 it was changed to
a <a href="http://www.gtk.org/">GTK+</a> GUI program using
the <a href="http://www.gtkmm.org/">gtkmm</a> C++ wrapper to
GTK+. In 2011 it was rewritten again with C using GTK+, without
GTKmm.
</p>
<h3>Copy Right and Legal Notice</h3>
<p>Quickplot -- an interactive 2D plotter</p>
<p>Copyright (C) 1998-2011 Lance Arsenault</p>
<p>Quickplot is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
</p>
<p>Quickplot is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.</p>
<p>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Quickplot. If not,
see <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html"
>http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html</a>.</p>
@FOOTER_HTM@
</body>
</html>
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