[Neutron] Release of NeXpy v0.12

[Osborn, Raymond]

NeXpy provides a high-level Python interface to NeXus data, within a simple GUI that combines a tree view of loaded files, Matplotlib panes to visualize multidimensional arrays, and an IPython shell for manipulating the data and metadata. NeXpy is intended to be a simple, intuitive, interactive toolbox that allows users to explore ways of modeling NeXus data, for example, created by Mantid, with minimal overhead, and to create new NeXus-conforming data files without expert knowledge of the file format. NeXpy makes it easy to view arbitrary 1D and 2D slices and projections of multi-dimensional data and to compare plots of multiple datasets.

A built-in script editor allows new data analysis methods to be developed, tested, and refined. The underlying Python API for reading and writing NeXus files is provided by the nexusformat package, which utilizes h5py. NeXpy also contains a GUI interface to the lmfit module for fitting 1D data. 

NeXpy v0.12 has just been released, and the underlying nexusformat API has been updated to v0.5. It is available on PyPI and conda-forge. Please note that this is the last version to support Python 2.

NeXpy Home Page: https://nexpy.github.io/nexpy/

Features include:

* Tabbed panels to copy limits between multiple plots and compare projections.
• Support for plotting non-orthogonal axes with fixed aspect ratios.
• Support for symmetric linear/log plots using divergent color maps.
• Tabular views of data values and metadata in multidimensional arrays.
• Backup and restore loaded NeXus files.
* File locks to protect NeXus files accessed by multiple processes.
* Autocompletion of NeXus attributes and dictionaries in the IPython shell.
* Support for all h5py File and Dataset options.
* Imports of SPEC, TIFF, CBF, ASCII and other data.

Jupyter Notebook
----------------
A tutorial on using the nexusformat API is available as a Jupyter Notebook. It can be accessed online in a Google colaboratory:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/nexpy/nexusformat/blob/master/src/nexusformat/notebooks/nexusformat.ipynb

Installation
--------------
NeXpy is available on both the Python Package Index server and Anaconda, using

 $ pip install nexpy

or 

 $ conda install -c conda-forge nexpy

Please report any bugs to the Github issues page. Other questions can be addressed to the NeXus Mailing List <nexus at nexusformat.org>. 

NeXpy Github: https://github.com/nexpy/nexpy
NeXpy Release Notes: https://github.com/nexpy/nexpy/releases

Ray Osborn
-- 
Ray Osborn, Senior Scientist
Materials Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439, USA
Phone: +1 (630) 252-9011
Email: ROsborn at anl.gov