Profit is a GUI (graphical user interface) tool for displaying and
analyzing high- and moderate-resolution spectra. Although designed
with high-resolution () X-ray spectra in mind, profit will
also work reasonably well with CCD resolution data (
) and
will work with spectra in other wavebands as well. Profit can read
spectra in a number of formats, including simple ASCII text. It
allows users to identify emission lines, to convert an identified line
into velocity units using a user-selected wavelength, to store (and
restore) individual spectra, to fit lines to gaussians, and other
features. Profit is meant to handle the ``exploratory'' phase of
analysis, although it has some powerful features. Combining the
velocity function with the ability to store and plot multiple
features, it is very easy to see if lines from a particular ion or
isosequence are systematically red- or blue- shifted, asymmetrical, or
broadened.
Profit's GUI is based on ROOT (http://root.cern.ch), a multifunctional library developed at CERN for high energy physics analysis. ROOT was chosen because it is well-supported and designed to handle histogram data smoothly. Although ROOT features and functions are used ``behind the scenes'' in profit, the user does not need to have any familiarity with ROOT to use profit, and in fact, ROOT users might find profit incomplete as we have removed many features in order to make a simple and robust tool. Profit runs natively on a variety of systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
This manual describes profit version 1.0. We plan to continue developing profit to add functionality, and welcome suggestions from users as to what features would be most useful. Requests, bug reports, and questions can be submitted at the Feedback form on the profit web site, http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/profit/; this can also be found at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Feedback.