Welcome to the home of tabcalc!

Actually there is not much done here yet. I wrote the program about one and a half year ago to serve my actual needs, and now I release it to the world, as it really is about time. So for now there is only that original version. If you want to use or test it, just grab it from the CVS. I invite you beeing nosy and visit the project info page, or even my home page. And don't forget to browse through the Source Forge for other software of interest...

Now what it is:

tabcalc is a ``Tabellenkalkulation'' as we use to say here in germany for a spreadsheet. Note the quotes, as tabcalc is a command line utility, just as plain and simple you U**x geeks like it.

Tabcalc takes an ASCII file containing a table as input, performs some arithmetics on the columns, and outputs the result again as ASCII table. It is designed to perform these annoying tasks of ``measurement data analysis'' like subtracting or deviding two columns of the output of some nightly physics experiment run.

How it looks like:

Let's say you have a table with five columns:

1. light wavelength (in nm)
2. output power of your light source (in pW)
3. some random blurp your program threw in here
4. light power reflected from whatever you're illuminating (in pW)
5. position of your light spot (in degrees stepper motor angle, started from some strange position).

1. light wavelength (in nm) (Column 1)
2. position of your spot (in um from some reasonable zero position), i.e.(stepper angle (Column 5) - some offset (say 38.4 deg)) / distance-per-degree (say 50um per revolution)
3. reflectance of your sample, i.e. input power (Column 4) / output power (Column 2)

Status:

tabcalc is alpha, but working quite fine. I had no crashs at all using it, and there was no suspicion of false results. That was the good news. The bad news is that the command line parser is just crap, so if you want to avoid trouble, you have to be quite generous with parentheses. Yes, that is the next developement target, given that the demand for it surmounts my motivation of doing other work.

The Makefile is from my original Linux setup, but as the code is crammed into one single .C-file yet, you won't encounter any problems even compiling it by hand.

The program itself was developed under Linux. Maybe you will need to get the gnu version of getopt on a different system. All the other stuff should be quite system independent. Please mail me any outcome of an attempt to get it running somewhere else.