# Introduction

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An introduction to SciGraphica, giving a brief outline of the package, its current capabilities, plans for the future and how you can contribute to the project.

# What is SciGraphica?

SciGraphica is an Open Source data analysis and visualisation tool. It pretends to be a clone of Microcal Origin but with the aim to be fully featured, cross-platform, user-friendly scientific package that through its Open Source nature can be extended and/or bugfixed by users, as well as being user-extensible with Python modules.

It is written fully in C, using the GTK+ and GtkExtra libraries and is released under the GNU General Public Licence.

# What can it do?

It can currently do the following:

- Plot data files or functions

- Import and Export ASCII data files

- Manipulate data in worksheets

- Have multiple worksheets and plots open simultaneously

- Edit plots in a fully WYSIWYG environment

- Produce publication quality PostScript output

- Load and Save projects in its native XML file format

- Use Python expressions in the worksheets

- Use a Python command-line interface for interacting with plots and worksheets

- Use graphics files as backdrops to plots

# What platforms will it run on?

SciGraphica is currently known to run on x86 Linux and FreeBSD operating systems and possibly other UNIX platforms. If you know of any other platforms that SciGraphica runs on then please let us know.

As SciGraphica is primarily based on C, GTK+ and Python, and all of these are known to work on Win32 platforms it should be theoretically possible to compile and run SciGraphica on Windows. If anyone has tried, or even better succeeded, then please let us know.

# How can I submit bugs, get help on using SciGraphica or help with development?

## Bug Submission

Providing the output from executing

    scigraphica --version (or sga --version for versions <0.7.1cvs)

would be appreciated along with any error messages or debugging info (if you know your way around gdb, for example) that you can provide, as well as what you were doing when you encountered the bug. If you can show us a repeatable method that causes the bug it'd be lovely.

SciGraphica uses the SourceForge interface for dealing with bug reports etc. Links to these can be found, along with much more, on the main SciGraphica project summary page. Here we can keep track of what bugs have been submitted and when, and you can easily see if your bug has been resolved or not.

## Getting help on how to use SciGraphica

There is a mailing list for SciGraphica users which you can subscribe to...(?)

There is inline/online help available (soon) with Tutorials to get you up and running and a User Guide for reference, as well as information on how to write Python modules for SciGraphica. These should be available from within SciGraphica itself and in the documentation section of the SciGraphica website.

## Contributing to SciGraphica

We can never have enough developers, users, documentation writers and PR spinmeisters spreading the word so if you think you can help at all then join the developers mailing list by sending an email to scigraphica-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net with the word "subscribe" in the subject or using this link.

# Credits

Contribute to SciGraphica and you too can have your name up in lights here...

- Adrian E. Feiguin <feiguin@magnet.fsu.edu>

  - Project Coordinator and original author of SciGraphica

- Conrad Steenberg <conrad@hep.caltech.edu>

  - Our Python specialist and binary packager

- Rob Lahaye <lahaye@users.sourceforge.net>

  - Coder and FreeBSD help

- Randolf Mock <randolf.mock@mchp.siemens.de>

  - Documentation

- John “Frinky” Bland <shrike@cmp.liv.ac.uk>

  - Documentation and SuSE help