Welcome to gtrace’s documentation!

gtrace traces Gaussian beams through an optical system laid out on a bench. You place mirrors and lenses in Python and trace the beams. You look at the result in gtrace’s viewer and move the elements until the layout is right. The viewer runs as a widget inside a Jupyter notebook, or as a standalone HTML page in a web browser. When the layout is finished, you export the drawing to DXF.

Install gtrace with:

pip install "gtrace[notebook]"

This command does not install Jupyter itself. If you do not have Jupyter:

pip install jupyterlab

Then read Introduction. That page builds a bench of a laser, a lens and two mirrors, and opens the bench in the viewer. Tutorial works through a larger example.

The other pages are reference:

Contents:

Indices and tables