Welcome to DataThief

What is DataThief III

What is new in DataThief III?

It is written in Java, it runs on Windows, Unix, Macos...

It is capable of tracing any more or less continuous line, even when the line crosses itself.

It can convert data from numeric format to any other format, for instance dates.

It is shareware. If you use DataThief please buy the shareware registration key from

Download DataThief

The MD5sum for Datathief.jar is:

2d76e91ab76c5c1b3c59337260ae2956 Datathief.jar

The manual

A nice video tutorial

Changes in DataThief III version 1.7

Changes in DataThief III version 1.6

Changes in DataThief III version 1.5

Changes in DataThief III version 1.4

Changes in DataThief III version 1.3

Changes in DataThief III version 1.2

Changes in DataThief III version 1.1

Screenshots

Examples

The first example

Translators example with sunrise

sunrise.png



There is a small problem with the sunrise example.

The toDate() and fromDate() functions use the Locale setting of your Java installation.

In plain English: the names of the months will be used according to your (Java) system's language settings.



This means that if you follow the sunrise example in the manual, you will have to give the abbreviated month names accordingly. For example, in a German system you have to give the Ref3 x-coordinate a value of 31-dez in stead of 31-dec . There is a small problem with the sunrise example.Theandfunctions use the Locale setting of your Java installation.In plain English: the names of the months will be used according to your (Java) system's language settings.This means that if you follow the sunrise example in the manual, you will have to give the abbreviated month names accordingly. For example, in a German system you have to give the Ref3 x-coordinate a value ofin stead of

Error bars

The date translator code

Known problems

Out of memory

Problem with MacOS X image load

Problem with Windows download

Trouble shooting

DataThief III is a program to extract (reverse engineer) data points from a graph.Typically, you scan a graph from a publication, load it into DataThief, and save the resulting coordinates, so you can use them in calculations or graphs that include your own data.Usualy downloading Datathief.jar will work. If not, see notes below.Even though the aim has been to create an easy to use tool, DataThief III has many possibilities that are hard to understand without the manual. So we urge you to download it.Kathryn Thomson made a nice video tutorial.Fixed a nasty little bug that sometimes caused a number to have an exponent of 1 less then it should be. E.g. 1e6 was shown as 1e5.Added fine motion.To move a point it is now possible to locate the mouse pointer over the point so the pointer will turn to a crosshair.Now you can move the point using the arrow keys on your keyboard.When you zoom in, the motion will be even more precise.The bug that was introduced in version 1.4 was repaired.There was another bug in the formatting of numbers. The number 1.0001 was formatted as 1.0E-4.It is fixed in version 1.4. (Thanks to Stephen Schwarz). Regretfully the fix introduced another bug. (See version 1.5)Made it possible to enter the key using copy and pasteThere was a serious bug in the previous versions of DataThief.Under certain circumstances negative numbers in scientific notation were respresented as positive (ouch)!This has been repaired in version 1.2. (Thanks to Meritt Reynolds).It is now impossible to move point to the top or the left out of the screen.If you have lost your reference locators, you can use the reset menu item to move all locators to their default positions.The graphs that are used as examples in the manual areI you get an error message explaining that the program quits due to a "OutOfMemoryError", this usually means that the image you are using is too big. Try reducing the dimensions of the image.There is one known problem which I have as yet been unable to solve: On (some versions of) MacOS X, when you load an image, it is not automatiaclly displayed. Zooming in and out, or any other way to refresh the screen will do the trick. I shall try to solve the problem, but it seems a tricky little item of what my software does with how Java is implemented for MacOS X.Some Windows installations offer to save the Datathief.jar file as Datathief.zip. Do not accept this; java requires the file to have the 'jar' extension.If you have problems starting Datathief.jar, the following might help:

The jar file contains a MANIFEST. The class that contains the main method is Datathief. So a basic command would be

java -classpath Datathief.jar Datathief



Or you might try



java -jar Datathief.jar

Citation

B. Tummers, DataThief III. 2006 <https://datathief.org/>

If you want to cite DataThief you can use: