Guppi 0.10.0

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

Hi,

There's a new Guppi on the usual ftp site. See http://www.gnome.org/guppi
for info on where to get it, how to compile it, and what it is.

I would recommend avoiding the Bonobo stuff in this release; if it works
at all, it will only work with CVS Bonobo. Guppi will compile fine without
it.

Guppi can print now; printing is only supported for scatter and line
plots. However, released versions of gnome-print have bugs that make the
output unusable. I've fixed it in CVS, and I'm working on a new
gnome-print release as we speak. The new gnome-print should print
properly.

I would love to have small tweaks to plot layout to make the on-screen and
printed output look nicer. The place to look if you want to hack this is
xyplotstate.cc, XyPlotState::recalc_layout().

Notable changes in this release: 

 * Printing for scatter and line plots
 * Better pie chart support, from the pie chart guys (Jan, Frank,
   Bernhard)
 * Assorted fixes for compile problems
 * Guile bindings are updated to reflect the new XY plot
 * Optimized some internal code
 * Split up debug-data generation menu items
 * Assorted code enhancements that will eventually become 
   user-visible features

People have pointed out that they load Guppi and aren't sure how to make
it do anything. :-) Here's some stuff you can do:

 - When Guppi loads, go to the Debug menu and add some debug datasets to 
   work with; alternatively, use the Text Import feature to import 
   your own data

 - Choose Plot->XY

 - Right-click on the XY plot window to get a menu; choose 
   "Add scatter plot layer"
 
 - If you have appropriate data sets, the scatter plot will 
   default to the first two. Otherwise, get appropriate sets,
   then choose Layer Properties, then select the datasets
   from the option menu

 - From the right-click menu, choose "marker palette"

 - click Red Pixel from the list of marker styles
  
 - Rename it to Red Square
 
 - Change its style from One Pixel to Unfilled Square

 - Increase its size to 4 or 5

 - If you want, change the color; notice that you can set opacity
   as part of the color (useful for densely-packed data)

 - Right-click on the plot, choose Toolbox

 - Click the Brush tool

 - wave the mouse around the scatter plot, and markers will be changed 
   to the Red Square style. Could also use Style Region to style 
   a rubberband rectangle.

 - Change aspects of Red Square from the palette editor; notice that 
   the plot updates on the fly.

 - Play with other tools; they all have tooltips, and work via left
   button

 - Choose Layer Properties from popup menu

 - Click "Add Attached Line Plot Layer" to add a line plot to the scatter
 
 - Note line plot

 - Choose Drag Point from the toolbox, and you can drag points around,
   and the line plot will follow

 - Note that changing the data set being plotted also changes it for the 
   attached line plot

 - Choose Print, and look at the nice printout (with a recent
   gnome-print).

So that's the XY plot, the most mature. For the pie and bar charts, the
secret is to double-click the plot to get a window allowing you to set the
data set to plot. There's not much else to do with them yet.

For all plots, if you click the dataset in the main window, you can edit
individual data values; the plot will automatically update on the fly to
reflect the new values.

To try the Guile stuff, open a terminal (File->Terminal) and try typing 
(guppi- then the Tab key to get a list of completions. In CVS, there's a
testing.scm file that does a simple script; it's not in the tarball
though. It has a comment at the top explaining how to load it.

You can also have a ~/.guppi.scm file that will be loaded on startup.

As always, send bugs to guppi-list@gnome.org or hp@pobox.com or
http://bugs.gnome.org; if you don't send me bugs, I can't fix them!

Thanks,
Havoc