# HDF Compass’s documentation

This document provide information about the HDF Compass application.

## In Brief

HDF Compass is an experimental viewer program for HDF5 and related formats, designed to complement other more complex applications like HDFView. Strong emphasis is placed on clean minimal design, and maximum extensibility through a plugin system for new formats.

HDF Compass is written in Python, but ships as a native application on Windows, OS X, and Linux, by using PyInstaller and Py2App to package the app.

## Contents

- Requirements
- License
  - Application License
  - Additional Copyright and License Information
- How to install
- How to use
- How to contribute [developer]
- Data Model [developer]
  - Introduction
  - Data stores
  - Nodes
  - Containers
  - Arrays
  - Key-Value lists
  - Images
  - Top-level functions
- How to release [developer]
  - Versioning
  - PyInstaller
- How to freeze [developer]

# Indices and tables

- Index

- Module Index

- Search Page