
                                About Quickplot

   a fast interactive 2D plotter

   Version 1.0.1rc   repo version 187

  Quickplot Home-page

   [1]http://quickplot.sourceforge.net/

  What is Quickplot?

   Quickplot is an interactive 2D plotter.  You can very quickly swim
   through data with Quickplot.

  What can Quickplot do other 2D plotters can't do?

   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.

   Quickplot has lots of command line options that let you customize your
   graphs in one 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.*).

   In most use cases the command to plot your data is quickplot FILENAME
   and Quickplot's default graphs may be all you need.

   Quickplot is more like an interactive data browser than an interactive
   picture editor.

   All future versions of Quickplot will keep the show me the data quickly
   theme.  This does not rule out additions that make Quickplot a more
   full-featured 2D plotter that [2]one can make pretty pictures with.

  New features in after version 0.8.*

     * draws much faster then version 0.8.*
     * has many more command line options
     * the new mouse grab and slide with left mouse button is very
       intuitive
     * more robust text data file reading
          + better locale support
          + reads rows with missing number entries
          + more row comment formats
          + reads infinity and nan, using nan as a line break
          + will read any text file and pick out the numbers
          + reads CSV files
     * Cairo drawing that provides translucent and transparent colors
       using RGBA
     * makes graphs with the X11 shape extension that float graphs on your
       screen letting you see though them to your other windows below
     * has fullscreen draw mode for presentations
     * reads more sound file formats with newer libsndfile
     * reads sound files from standard input (pipe input) with newer
       libsndfile
     * better double buffer drawing with super quick re-expose redraws,
       fixes previous versions slow re-expose redraws
     * Quickplot is no longer written in C++ so it builds and installs
       faster with less prerequisites
     * a command line shell that let you interact with a running quickplot
       process from a text based command shell (added in version 0.10.*)

  Installation prerequisites

   Quickplot uses the GNU Autotools (./configure) to build and install.
   To build Quickplot from the distribution source tarball (example:
   quickplot-1.0.1rc.tar.bz2) the following packages are required to be
   installed:
     * [3]GTK+   has many prerequisites, but they all come with most
       GNU/Linux distributions.  GTK+ version 3 is required for Quickplot
       version 1.0.1rc.
     * [4]GNU readline   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.
     * [5]libsndfile    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.

  Development prerequisites

   To build and develop Quickplot from the [6]GIT source the following
   packages, in addition to the above packages, are required to be
   installed:
     * The GNU Autotools   [7]Autoconf, [8]Automake, and [9]Libtool are
       used to build the Quickplot source.
     * [10]ImageMagick   The convert program, from ImageMagick, is used to
       make xpm images from PNG images in the Quickplot source.
     * [11]Lynx   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 help page is used to make the man
       page.

   The --enable-developer option flag is required to be set when running
   configure when building Quickplot from the repository source files. It
   adds make targets to build files that are not in the source repository
   but are needed to make a source tarball. Quickplot will fail to build
   without these generated files.

  The name and history of this program

   We call it Lanceman's Quickplot 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.

   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 [12]Debian GNU/Linux distribution soon after.

   Quickplot started out in 1998 as an Athena Widgets X11 GUI (graphical
   user interface) program.  In 2003 it was rewritten as a [13]QT GUI
   program.  In 2004 it was changed to a [14]GTK+ GUI program using the
   [15]gtkmm C++ wrapper to GTK+.  In 2011 it was rewritten again with C
   using GTK+, without GTKmm.

  Copy Right and Legal Notice

   Quickplot -- an interactive 2D plotter

   Copyright (C) 1998-2011 Lance Arsenault

   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
   [16]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 [17]http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

   [18] Top  |  About  | [19] Help  Quickplot Version 1.0.1rc

References

   1. http://quickplot.sourceforge.net/
   2. file:///home/lanceman/git/quickplot/help.html#house
   3. http://www.gtk.org/
   4. http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html
   5. http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/
   6. https://github.com/lanceman2/quickplot
   7. http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/
   8. http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/
   9. http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/
  10. http://www.imagemagick.org/
  11. http://lynx.isc.org/
  12. http://www.debian.org/
  13. http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/
  14. http://www.gtk.org/
  15. http://www.gtkmm.org/
  16. http://www.fsf.org/
  17. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
  18. file:///home/lanceman/git/quickplot/index.html
  19. file:///home/lanceman/git/quickplot/help.html
