Hi, Sorry for coming in late in this conversation. I won't disagree that Origin or Igor Pro can be used to make lovely publication-quality graphics -- those are fine choices. The poor quality of the graphics in the older versions of Ifeffit / Horae was always been a disappointment to me. It's certainly reasonable to say that exporting to another program is necessary, but I believe the latest versions should and do have much higher quality graphics. Larch certainly has much better graphics than Ifeffit. See for example: http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/xafs/xafsft.html#examples-forward-xafs-fo... In the on-line docs, the graphics may look mediocre because they are scaled, but if you click on them you will see the PNG file created directly by saving the image from the Plot window (or cut with Ctrl-C and pasted directly into presentation software). Another example (from the feffit chapter): http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/_images/feffit_feo_r.png shows the Greek characters and mathematical rendering, generated using latex notation. Depending on what you need, these may publication quality graphs,and they can be copied directly from the Plotting windows into other applications (for example, Ctrl-C to copy to clipboard works). The axis labels (plain text or latex), colors, symbols, line widths, and so on can be adjusted from a Plot Configuration window after the plot is drawn, see http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/plotting/index.html#interactive-use-of-th... There are many things that cannot be done simply with these plots (figure-in-figure, complex stacking), but in principle, Larch can be used to generate any of the kinds of plots available from the matplotlib library, see http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html Of course, this does requires some scripting to make plots. There are other good, free choices for making high-quality graphics. As others have said, investing some time in learning how to make high quality graphics is worth the effort. Origin or Igor Pro are very good tools, and would be fine choices for learning and not very expensive. But please do not use Excel. It cannot make publication quality graphics. Cheers, --Matt