Documentation

User documentation, Manual pages, Developer documentation, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

Miscellaneous:

• A slightly technical overview of Gwyddion design.
• Motivation, a document predating Gwyddion and explaining circumstances that led to its creation.
• What is new in 2.0, an overview of major user-visible changes in Gwyddion 2.0.
• Some plans for future versions and version numbering explanation.

User documentation

Consists of Gwyddion User guide, available here for on-line browsing. The complete user guide can be also downloaded for off-line reading:

English, HTML:	gwyddion-user-guide-xhtml-en-2009-11-11.tar.gz	2009-11-11	4.6 MB
English, PDF (A4 paper):	gwyddion-user-guide-en-2009-11-11.pdf	2009-11-11	4.55 MB
English, HTML Win32 installer:	Gwyddion-User-Guide-XHTML-English-2009-11-11.exe
DocBook XML sources:	gwyddion-user-guide-2009-11-11.tar.gz	2009-11-11	4.2 MB

You probably want the ready-to-read HTML, not the DocBook XML sources. The guide is distributed as a plain pack of HTML files, point your Web browser to index.html to start reading.

Known problems in the PDF version:

• The figures are in color as in the HTML version. Hence, some are not very useful when printed on a black-and-white printer.
• Long commands or variables sometimes stick out of the paragraph, or even the page, this concerns namely section Installation.
• Footnotes do not work inside tables, this concerns only the table of supported file formats.

Gwyddion user guide can be copied, distributed and/or modified under the terms of either GNU General Public License or GNU Free Documentation License.

Nightly snapshots of the guide are also available for on-line browsing:

English

French

Russian

and in PDF with the usual caveats.

English, PDF (A4 paper):	user-guide-en.pdf	2010-03-11	4.55 MB
French, PDF (A4 paper):	user-guide-fr.pdf	2010-03-11	2.01 MB
Russian, PDF (A4 paper):	user-guide-ru.pdf	2010-03-11	4.54 MB

Presently, only the English version is complete.

Manual pages

Unix manual pages of Gwyddion commands are now part of the user guide:

gwyddion(1)
gwyddion-thumbnailer(1)

Developer documentation

Developer documentation consists of API reference of Gwyddion libraries (for core developers and module authors), and Module tutorial (for module writers) and Plug-in proxy reference (for plug-in writers) that are included in libgwymodule documentation.

Two different versions of API documentation exist: stable which describes the last stable Gwyddion version (currently 2.19); and the nightly generated one, which reflects whatever state the source tree currently is. Gwyddion version a function or other symbol was introduced in is noted in its entry, at least in the stable documentation. API documentation is also present in source tarballs and development packages.

Stable documentation index (2.19):

• libgwyddion – Gwyddion core library
• libgwyprocess – Gwyddion data processing library
• libgwydraw – Gwyddion drawing library
• libgwydgets – Gwyddion widget library
  • Data windows and views
  • Graph
  • 3D Widgets
  • General widgets
  • Widget utilities
• libgwymodule – Gwyddion module library
  • Module library
  • Module tutorial
  • Plug-in proxy reference
• libgwyapp – Gwyddion application library

Subversion trunk (head) documentation index:

• libgwyddion – Gwyddion core library
• libgwyprocess – Gwyddion data processing library
• libgwydraw – Gwyddion drawing library
• libgwydgets – Gwyddion widget library
  • Data windows and views
  • Graph
  • 3D Widgets
  • General widgets
  • Widget utilities
• libgwymodule – Gwyddion module library
  • Module library
  • Module tutorial
  • Plug-in proxy reference
• libgwyapp – Gwyddion application library
• pygwy – Python interface, for now it is mostly generated from the C API documentation, therefore it can be a bit confusing (read: wrong)
• Pygwy tutorial – An introduction to Pygwy: Gwyddion binding to Python language