Why Gsharp?

Overview

Gsharp is a powerful standalone application for technical data presentation. It is an extremely flexible tool and can be used in a wide variety of scenarios by a wide variety of users. Gsharp can be used interactively or driven by the Gsharp Script Language. Gsharp scripts can also be run in batch mode or on a web server. Gsharp can be used to create a pie-chart for a web page or a 3D contour plot with fault lines for plotting on a 2m wide plotter. Data can consist of 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 or more values. Gsharp's interface can be easily configured to include standard templates, data readers and specially designed dialogs. Standalone applications can also be created which will also run without modification on Windows, UNIX or VMS .

Data Input

Gsharp can read data from a large number of data formats. These include:

  • CSV files - comma delimited files output from Microsoft Excel
  • Report files - columns of data in ASCII format
  • ASCII files - any other form of ASCII file
  • Binary files - created by a C or FORTRAN program
  • Folder files - archived from previous Gsharp sessions
  • Excel files and by pasting Excel data straight from the Windows clipboard into the Gsharp DataManager
  • Through ODBC - Using embedded SQL commands
  • Using GSL commands such as fopen(), fread() and fclose()
  • Using the AVS Field format and the import_field function.
  • Your own C and FORTRAN readers linked to Gsharp through UserFunc.c

Data Processing

Gsharp contains 225 functions for reading, processing, filtering, reshaping and operating on your data. These include statistics, math, logic, matrix manipulation, interpolation, cartographic projections and time/date related functions.. The Gsharp Script Language can also be used to combine existing functions into a new function of your own.

By working with your data within Gsharp you save time by not having to export and import the data to external applications.

Graphics

Gsharp has a large variety of highly configurable 2D and 3D graph types. There is no limit to the number of graphs that can be drawn in each viewport and no limit to the number of viewports on the page. Graphs can easily be combined. Gsharp includes support for linear, log, polar, date, time, date/time and user-defined axes all of which are highly configurable.

Gsharp includes many example plots to show the enormous number of possibilities. These can be displayed using the Example menu.

Output

Gsharp will generate output at the highest resolution supported by the selected device. You can send plots directly to a Windows printer or create a file for any of the hundreds of devices support directly by Gsharp, including PostScript, CGM, TIFF, GIF, PNG and JPEG.

Gsharp Script Language

Gsharp can be driven using the Gsharp Script Language (GSL). GSL has full support for flow control and functions with parameters and local variables. Gsharp can generate GSL commands to reproduce your plot. GSL can also be used to configure the interface with new menus, new dialogs and new results from canvas interaction.

GSL is platform independent and so can be used without modification by Gsharp on Windows, UNIX (including linux) or VMS.