Hey all,
I have a bunch of ideas to improve Veusz. We (UDRI-SME group) currently use a
mix of Excel, Kaleidagraph, and Python scripts to reduce our material test
data. My python lacks a gui, Kaleidagraph is expensive and quirky, and Excel
is ubiquitous, but it also has limitations. Besides, Excel - yuck!
I'd like to incorporate the needed features into Veusz so I can eventually use
just this. The first and most important of which was to just to be able to
open my data sets. I needed to handle old-style MAC terminators because our
DAQ system was written on Labview using Macintoshes. We've never gone back
and fixed it. (Why bother?) (I've already posted the patch for the mac
terminators.)
Veusz needs to be able to handle datasets with headers. All my data is in
ASCII format, but it has headers in the first two lines identifying the column
type and unit. I can work around this by deleting the headers, but I
shouldn't have to.
Actually, I just told Veusz to skip the first two lines and that works fine:
stream.newLine()
stream.flushLine()
stream.newLine()
stream.flushLine()
I think if people have to modify their data sets to make them work they just
won't use the program. At the very least there ought to be a box to select
how many lines to skip. (That's what Kaleidagraph does.) As it stands, data
with text headers gets imported, but can't be plotted because it's not
recognized as numbers. (Kaleidagraph has the same flaw if you don't skip the
headers. It's a pain.) I think it would be slick to automatically recognize
when the first few lines are text and auto-populate the descriptors box. We
could also look for and just ignore text. (This is more or less what excel
does. I think this program ought to be at least as clever as excel...)
I think it makes sense to prepend the filename to the imported datasets. It
will make the dataset names long, but will make it much easier to distinguish
between data from multiple files. We will need to scrub the name for illegal
characters. (It doesn't like - or + because those are used for error limits.
Comma (',') would probably cause problems too.)
Also, I think the formulas used to relate datasets ought to be editable. You
can always delete datasets and re-enter them, but that gets messy. Is there
already some way to do this that isn't obvious?
Also, in the plot window. A cool feature of some plotting software programs
is that you can put markers on your trace to identify the line rather than
corresponding to specific data points. My sets (stress strain curves) have
>1000 data points typically and displaying all data points just looks bad. It
would be nice to be able to display just a small percentage of the data points
as markers and connect them with a line.
What do you think? To be clear, I'm offering to do all this stuff not asking
for somebody else to do it. I just wanted to bounce ideas off somebody. This
looks like an excellent program and I'm excited to contribute if I can!
Bryan
--
Bryan Harris
Research Engineer
Structures and Materials Evaluation Group
[email protected]
http://www.udri.udayton.edu/
(937) 229-5561
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