ANNOUNCE: Fulcrum scientific plotting tool update

[Conrad Steenberg <conrad srl caltech edu>]

           Fulcrum Scientific Analysis/Plotting Tool for Unix/GTK
           ------------------------------------------------------

9 October 1998

The fulcrum development team is pleased to announce the avalibility of a new
snapshot. The fulcrum project aims to develop a useful, fast and full-
featured scientific plotting and data analysis package under the GPL. The
purpose of the snapshot release is to create interest in the projects and to
attract potential co-developers.

The new snapshot fulcrum-09.10.1998.tar.gz availible on
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/srl/personnel/conrad.html. See also the
screenshot on the same page.

Changes include: 
o Added icons to the tree view.
o Massive progess on the coordinate system/box object, with support for many
  different tick/tick label styles as well as logarithmic axes.
o Added the xy line/scatter plot object.
o Introduced data sharing between the GUI and the yorick interpreter.
o As always some bug fixes.

The screenshot shows three plots in the plot window, two of them containing
lines of the form y=x^2 and y=x^3. The data for these plots was
automatically generated by the yorick interpreter from instructions in the
xy line/scatter plot object. This means you have full access to the
functionality of yorick functions/packages, including standard math
functions, numerical integration/differentiation, fft's, data cuts, matrix
inversion, pde sololutions, 1D and 2D interpolation, ASCII/binary file I/O,
reading FITS files, etc...

To do:
------
o After the xy plot object is finished, work will start on the more visible
  GUI elements of fulcrum, finally bringing it up to a usable state.
o There are many more plot objects to be added, including histograms, vector 
  fields, keys to plot objects, text and other geometric primitives.
o Fulcrum will be GNOMEified once the basic functionality has reached a more
  stable state.


Installation and usage instructions:
------------------------------------

1. Installation
Unpack the tarball fulcrum.tar.gz

Type in './configure', the 'make'. If all goes well a binary named 'fulcrum'
will be built in the Yorick subdirectory. To install, type 'make install' as
root if you compiled the package to be installed in the system directories
(the default is /usr/local)

Run the binary Yorick/fulcrum and enjoy... or whatever you do when you see
unfinished programs.

2. Usage 
The main window in divided into three parts, from left to right, the object
tree display, which should show a document containing one page. The
graph/spreadheet display, with a fractal C-curve in blue displayed. There is
also a tab for the spreadsheet window. On the right hand side an interperter
window should display the yorick copuright message and prompt.

You can execute commands in the interpreter window.

Try typing in the following commands:

x=span(0,10,100) 
y=x^2
y

The values of the array 'y' will now be displayed. For help on yorick, type
in 'help'. There is a command history, accessed using the cursor up and down
keys.

3. Copyright
This code is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 2. The
Yorick interperter falls under a more liberal BSD-style copyright, see the
file COPYING.yorick for details.

Conrad Steenberg

*-----------------------------------------*                                  
| Conrad Steenberg                        |                                  
| e-mail: conrad@srl.caltech.edu          |                                  
| Tel: (626) 395-2965 Fax: (626) 449-8676 |                                  
*-----------------------------------------*