Explanation

What this plugin is (and isn't)

nomad-north-gwyddion is a thin wrapper: it does not implement any SPM data processing itself. All it does is package the existing Gwyddion application into a container and register that container with NOMAD as a NORTH tool, so it can be launched, isolated and reproducibly, directly against files already stored in a NOMAD upload -- without anyone having to install Gwyddion locally or move data out of NOMAD to work with it.

There is deliberately no NOMAD schema, parser, or app in this plugin: Gwyddion's own project files and exports stay Gwyddion's own formats, and nothing here tries to normalize them into NOMAD metadata.

Why a desktop tool, not a Jupyter tool

Gwyddion is a GUI application (levelling, filtering, and profile tools are used interactively on 2D data), so it is built on FAIRmat's nomad-north-desktop-base image rather than a Jupyter-only base. That base image provides the xfce desktop that NORTH needs to expose a full application window in the browser; this plugin's Dockerfile only adds the gwyddion package itself and an autostart entry (config/Gwyddion.desktop) so the application opens automatically when the desktop session starts, instead of leaving the user to find it in a menu.

Why these file extensions

The file_extensions list in the NORTHTool configuration (dm4, tif, tiff, wip, wit, spm, ibw) drives which files in a NOMAD upload offer "open with gwyddion" -- it is intentionally scoped to formats Gwyddion can actually import (Digital Micrograph, TIFF, WITec, and Asylum Research/Igor Binary Wave, among others; see Gwyddion's supported file formats for the full, much larger list Gwyddion itself supports beyond what's exposed here).

Why install from PyPI

The publishing workflow bumps the image tag in NORTHTool (e.g. to v0.1.6) as part of building the release, but that bump is not pushed back to GitHub -- so the entry point on the main branch, and in any release tag or ZIP downloaded from GitHub, always resolves to the :main image tag rather than the pinned release image. Installing from PyPI is the only way to get an entry point whose image tag actually matches the installed package version; if you must install from a GitHub checkout or ZIP, update the image tag in north_tools/__init__.py by hand first.