PlotXY: a high quality plotting system for the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE), and the astronomical community

The Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE) was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with NASA and the Herschel Instrument Control Centres to provide the astronomical community a complete environment to process and analyze the data gathered by the Herschel Space Observatory. One of the most important components of HIPE is the plotting system (named PlotXY) that we present here. With PlotXY it is possible to produce easily high quality publication ready 2D plots. It provides a long list of features, with fully configurable components, and interactive zooming. The entire code of HIPE is written in Java and is open source released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3. A new version of PlotXY is being developed to be independent from the HIPE code base; it is available to the software development community for the inclusion in other projects at the URL http://code.google.com/p/jplot2d/.