Gwyddion

Gwyddion is a modular program for SPM (scanning probe microscopy) data visualization and analysis. Primarily it is intended for the analysis of height fields obtained by scanning probe microscopy techniques (AFM, MFM, STM, SNOM/NSOM) and it supports a lot of SPM data formats. However, it can be used for general height field and (greyscale) image processing, for instance for the analysis of profilometry data or thickness maps from imaging spectrophotometry.

Gwyddion provides a large number of data processing functions, including all the standard statistical characterization, levelling and data correction, filtering or grain marking functions. And since the developers are active SPM users, the program also contains a number of specific, uncommon, odd and experimental data processing methods they found useful – and you may find them useful too.

Gwyddion is Free and Open Source software, covered by GNU General Public License. It aims to provide a modular program for 2D data processing and analysis that can be easily extended by third-party modules and scripts. Moreover, thanks to being free software, it provides the source code to developers and users, which makes easier both verification of its data processing algorithms and further program improvements.

Gwyddion works on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems on common architectures. All systems can be used also for development. It has a modern graphical user interface based on the widely portable Gtk+ toolkit, consistent across all the supported systems.

News

	Current versions
	Gwyddion:	2.68
	Gwyddion 3:	3.4
	libgwyfile:	1.6
	gwydump:	2.1
	gwyiew:	2.0
	threshold:	2.6

2025-05-10: Version 3.4 “Verge of Brink” was released. It is a development milestone. The most focus was on internal clean-up and preparation for further development. It also added initial support for gobject-introspection, enabling the use of Gwyddion libraries from Python and other languages. However, it is still work in progress.

2025-05-10: Version 3.3 “Moving Together” was released. It is a development milestone. Libraries were rationalised to just three, remote control was rewritten to GApplication and various cleanup continued. SVG icons are also now used directly.

2025-04-08: Version 3.2 “Serial Reviver” was released. It is a development milestone. More deprecated GTK+ widgets were replaced. The main focus was rewritten serialisation though.

2025-03-24: Version 2.68 “Clustersnack” was released. It brings reworked volume data clustering as well as a couple new file import modules and the usual pile of bug fixes and smaller improvements. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2025-03-11: Would you like to develop Gwyddion as a part of your PhD? Check our open position for AI in SPM data processing for life sciences, which is part of SPM4.0 MSCA project on autonomous SPM.

2025-03-11: Version 3.1 “True Grid” was released. It is a development milestone. A good progress with GTK+ 3 porting was made, although it is far from being done.

2025-01-02: A brief explanation what is (and what is not) Gwyddion 3.x was added to frequently asked questions.

2024

2024-12-31: Version 3.0 “It Lives!” was released. It is a development milestone in porting to new GTK+, Python, etc. It does not contain any new features. In fact, a number of features are still disabled or buggy. You can compile it from source code if you are interested and it should mostly work. But at this stage there is not much reason to do so.

2024-11-13: We are happy to announce the publication of an Measurement Science and Technology paper Stitching accuracy in large area Scanning Probe Microscopy which describes the stitching method with simultaneous scanner background estimation implemented in Gwyddion recently.

2024-11-11: Source code tarballs (and possibly other signed items) are now signed by Yeti's new GnuGP key. To make the change a bit less abrupt, version 2.67 is signed by both keys (.sig2 denoting the new signature). However, the old one will cease to be used.

2024-11-11: Version 2.67 “Twenty Four” was released. It brings several new curve map and XYZ modules, bias corrected ACF as well the usual array of bug fixes and file format support improvements. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2024-06-14: We are happy to announce the publication of an Engineering Research Express paper Self-consistent autocorrelation for finite-area bias correction in roughness measurement which attempts to give a simple practical solution to the problem of finite-area bias in roughness measurement. The methods are not available in Gwyddion yet, but should appear in the next version.

2024-05-24: Version 2.66 “Pasta” was released. It is mainly a bugfix release with a number of file format support improvements and new SMM calibration. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2024-01-04: Version 2.65 “Arithmetic Amends” was released. It is mainly a bugfix release with a couple of smaller improvements. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2023

2023-10-29: Version 2.64 “Delayed Drifter” was released. It brings the second large batch of new volume and XYZ data processing modules as well as support for several new file formats and greatly improved support for existing ones. It also adds the XKCD Painbow false colour gradient. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2023-08-01: We are happy to announce the publication of a Hardware X paper Scanning Probe Microscopy controller with advanced sampling support which gives an overview of Gwyscope. It is a low-cost open DSP controller for SPM focusing on demonstrating adaptive scanning, general XYZ data acquisition and statistical data processing at the controller level. More information about Gwyscope can be found at the project's website gwyscope.net.

2023-06-13: Version 2.63 “Voluntarily Volatile” was released. Beside the usual file format support and other improvements it brings mainly a bunch of new volume data processing modules. And more are to come. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2023-04-24: Version 1.6 of libgwyfile was released. It fixed a bug in handling of "segments" item in GwyLawn.

2023-03-08: We are happy to announce the publication of a Measurement Science and Technology paper Demystifying data evaluation in the measurement of periodic structures which revisits data evaluation methods for the measurement of period/pitch of periodic structures such as gratings. A 1D grating evaluation module based on this work is under development and present in recent nightly builds.

2023-01-03: Updated gwydump MS Windows executables were published, replacing the ancient ones no longer working with the libraries packaged with Gwyddion. Both 32bit and 64bit executables are now available.

2022

2022-11-03: Version 2.62 “Getting there” was released. It is mainly continues with module code clean-up, but brings also a number of file format support and other improvements and bugfixes, as well as a couple of new curve map modules. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2022-09-15: The size of equations in the user guide was corrected and they should again display reasonably sized instead of tiny.

2022-05-13: A new version of the sample standalone module was released: threshold-example-2.6. It was rewritten to use GwyParams for parameter handling. It now requires Gwyddion 2.59, but it is a lot shorter and contains basically no explicit GTK+ code. The comments were also improved. It should be a better base for writing a Gwyddion module if compatibility with older versions is not required.

2022-05-02: Version 2.61 “Fermentation” was released. It is mainly a bugfix release, with a number of smaller improvements and corrections of problems which appeared in the two previous versions. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2022-03-02: The Gwyddion project received the SourceForge ‘Open Source Excellence’ award.

2022-02-11: Version 1.5 of libgwyfile was released. The library was updated to support data types added to Gwyddion in the last couple of years.

2021

2021-11-12: Version 2.60 “Lawnmower League” was released. It brings a new data type, curve maps, which are sets of curves defined in each image pixel. There are also a bunch of new graph modules and the usual file format improvements. See the detailed news for the complete list of changes.

2021-07-23: Along with data analysis, Gwyddion also offers a number of modules for generation of artificial SPM data (and patterns in general, see GIMP plug-in replacements). If you want to know how artificial data can be used in SPM, you can read our recent review in which we summarised the methods and applications.

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Thanks

Gwyddion development is supported by Department of Nanometrology, Czech Metrology Institute.