TFStudio 1.8.4

Changelog

v1.8.4

Fixed

• Updating with the installer no longer loses unsaved designs, settings and the chosen data folder; this update also carries them over from the version it replaces.
• Project Explorer: a design copied into another project folder outside TFStudio is a design of its own, so saving or deleting one copy no longer changes or deletes the other.
• When there is no more room to keep unsaved edits until the next start, TFStudio says so instead of dropping them without a word.

TFStudio 1.8.3

Tip

Tutorial on how to design gain flattening filter (GFF) in TFStudio 1.8.3 - https://tfstudio.xyz/blog/gain-flattening-filter-design

Changelog

v1.8.3

Added

• New theme: Dark Warm.
• Process Exporter: CSV and text output beside .res, one file per step or one table with a column per step.
• Merit Function Editor: operands in dB and optical density, curve-target and GFF presets in wizard.
• Measured Spectra and Measured Ellipsometry: New curve and Edit open a curve editor, a table beside a plot, to type, paste or change a curve's points with the design's own curve drawn behind them; Integral Values opens a user source or detector table in the same editor.

Changed

• The Linux AppImage no longer needs libfuse2, so the separate .tar.gz download is gone.
• Material Editor: Custom, the constant n = 1.5 material, is gone from the built-in catalog, so a design that used it reports it as missing; an Add button above the material list makes a blank material or brings materials in from refractiveindex.info or from TFCalc, Macleod or OptiLayer files; a new material's ID comes from its name; a long n,k table opens without delay and scrolls in a box of its own.
• Wavelength and step fields in every window take any positive value, and no window holds a range to a set number of points.
• RefractiveIndex.info browser: a page is imported whole instead of its 200 nm to 20 µm part, and a formula page arrives as its formula instead of a sampled table; a material imported earlier keeps what it had until it is imported again.
• Synthesis windows: the material pool starts with only the materials of the design's layers ticked, so a run no longer inserts the substrate glass or an unrelated material unless you add it.
• Add, delete and close buttons across the app use the same icons as the right-click menus instead of typed + and × signs, and a row's delete button is a bin.

Fixed

• Material Editor: comments of built-in materials and of refractiveindex.info imports show in full instead of stopping mid-word, and saving an imported material keeps its comment.
• RefractiveIndex.info browser: pages for gases, liquid crystals and a few crystals import instead of closing the Material Editor with an error, seven pages that imported wrong values now match the database, and the chart no longer covers the Add to Catalog button.
• Measured Spectra and Measured Ellipsometry: a file whose rows start with a text label imports with every column under its own name, and a curve of more than about 120,000 points no longer stops Refinement and synthesis at launch.
• Formula materials from refractiveindex.info, glass catalogs and OptiLayer have no index where their formula gives no real n, instead of reading n = 1 there.
• Integral Values: a table pasted from Excel or written with decimal commas keeps everything after the comma, and one separated by single spaces is no longer dropped.
• Merit Function Editor: the wizard's worst-case rows check the band as finely as every other worst-case row, in designs saved with the old rows too, so a narrow dip can no longer slip through; a row saved by a newer TFStudio that this version does not know says so instead of being scored as transmittance, reflectance or absorptance.
• Refinement and Structural Optimizer: switching designs shows the new design's own last run, and Refinement's Best no longer applies the other design's result.
• Dialogs with their own Cancel or Close button, such as rename, new catalog and delete, no longer close when you click outside them or let go of a text selection past their edge.

TFStudio 1.8.2

Changelog

v1.8.2

Added

• Structural Search: every run takes a seed, shown in its history, so a run can be replayed.
• Gradual Evolution: Deep search keeps a run searching until you press Stop.
• Design Editor: a thickness cell steps up and down with arrows that appear on hover or with the mouse wheel over it, and every open window follows as the value moves.

Changed

• Roughness Scattering: each interface takes a short-range or long-range roughness, modelled as a transition layer, so a high reflector loses little inside its band and transmitted light is no longer overstated as lost.
• Optimization windows: band averages and spectral targets sample as finely as the coating's fringes need, so a thick design's merit is the band's true value and thin designs optimize faster.
• Cone angle: refinement and needle synthesis are many times faster on many-layer designs, enough angles are chosen automatically for narrowband filters, and rays past grazing are left out with a warning in the Design Editor.
• Design Cleaner and Needle Manual refine with the Refinement window's default method, no longer freeze on large designs, and can be stopped.
• Gradual Evolution: Max layers limits the design instead of ending the run. At the limit it frees the layer that costs least and keeps looking, and a run goes on until its GE cycles are used or nothing is left to try.
• Integral Values: a row whose band the spectrum does not cover reads n/a with the spectrum's range, the solar rows cover 300-2500 nm, and Tvis and Rvis count narrow notches at their true width.
• Structural Optimizer: Min thickness follows the merit function's MNT row, as in Gradual Evolution, and a note under it shows when the two differ.
• Variator: thickness sliders run from zero to double the layer; the preview's Targets button matches Optical Evaluation, and the plot has no legend or design line under it.
• Monte-Carlo: a run can be replayed from its seed, the spec yield shows the range it can move by chance, and keep n·d holds at the design reference wavelength so the plot range no longer changes the trials; the report's Monte-Carlo block shows the run's own settings.

Fixed

• Refinement: no hidden maximum layer thickness (add an MXT row for an upper limit); Damped Least Squares, Newton and Newton-CG no longer stall with layers at the minimum thickness, and Damped Least Squares converges much faster on TGT, RGT and AGT targets and stops once the merit stops falling.
• Needle and Gradual Evolution: layers stuck at the minimum thickness are removed when the design is better without them, the merit shown for each step matches the design, insertions are ranked correctly with TANPSI or TOD rows, and Gradual Evolution no longer stops at once on its GE-step limit after a finished run or a Reset, no longer repeats a forced step that the refining after it took back, and no longer fills its history with Needle rows that add no layer. They and Structural Search start the next Run from the design as edited while the window was closed, and show their status and stop messages in the interface language.
• Calculations are correct at grazing incidence, exactly at a critical angle, and through layers no light gets through, such as thick metal or an air gap past the critical angle, where optical density no longer stops near 43 and the E-field decays instead of staying flat. Absorptance under an absorbing incident medium is what the coating absorbs, and optimization and Psi/Delta fits get correct gradients through such layers and deep absorbing stacks.
• Structural Optimizer no longer stays on its starting design for a whole run, also from a single layer at a high Min thickness; T₀ now defaults to 0.3, Max added to 500 nm and the smart starting design to off.
• Systematic Deviations: the global Δn and Δk shift only the coating layers, not the incident medium, substrate or exit medium.
• Color Evaluation and the report's colour block count a narrow notch or passband at its true width.
• Mono and Broadband Monitoring Simulators: a noiseless run builds the design on target; Mono no longer cuts layers thicker than a quarter wave far too thin and its time cuts carry the rate error; the Broadband thickness fit no longer settles in the wrong fringe, its monitor no longer knows the true thicknesses, and the rate varies inside a layer.
• Unsaved work: a design saved from another copy of TFStudio opens as saved, with the older unsaved version one Ctrl+Z back; keeping unsaved work no longer slows editing on large projects.
• Variator: switching to another window and back keeps the sliders where they were, and Ctrl+Z takes back what they changed instead of being written over.
• Material Editor: the step where a fit hands over to the table is reported and drawn; materials with an unknown formula or an empty table show as unavailable instead of n = 1.5, and AGF glasses with an unknown formula or OptiLayer files with no n values are named and left out.

TFStudio 1.8.1

Changelog

v1.8.1

Added

• Games. Click version number 7 times in About window to unlock them.
• Design Editor: layer rows have up and down arrows again.
• Measured Ellipsometry: reads Woollam CompleteEASE variable-angle exports as one Ψ/Δ pair per angle, and Accurion EP4Control files as one pair per region of interest. Thanks to Orwobt for providing files.
• Material Editor: materials carry mechanical and thermal constants, from Young's modulus to surface energy, and take them wherever the material goes, a design file included. A glass imported from an AGF catalog arrives with its expansion coefficient, modulus and Poisson's ratio.
• Merit function: a film stress operand, STR, targets the force a coating puts on its substrate. Set it to zero and the optimizer balances the stack so the part comes out flat; all it needs is a stress per material from a wafer-bow measurement.
• Stress: a new analysis window on the Analysis tab gives the stress in each film, the bow the coating leaves in the substrate, and how close the stack is to cracking or letting go. It reads the mechanical constants off the materials and takes the two temperatures and the substrate size from the design.

Changed

• Measured Ellipsometry: Ψ and Δ can be fitted separately; the curve list is one compact card per curve; the panel and the plot are split by a divider you can drag.
• Measured Ellipsometry and Measured Spectra: the angle, polarization or Δ convention are asked beside the column being configured, and only when the file leaves them unsaid; an opened file belongs to the design it was opened for, so switching designs no longer shows it; with no design selected, import is off.
• Measured Spectra and n,k Characterization: the front/back setting on a measured spectrum is gone. A measurement is taken with the coated face toward the beam.
• Material Editor: a material is shown on two pages, n & k and Mechanical, with its name, id, colour and wavelength range above both.

Fixed

• Measured Ellipsometry: a Δ written below zero is drawn on the axis instead of cut off.
• Preferences: a preferences file that can no longer be read, after a hand edit left a typo in it, is kept as a copy beside the new one instead of being overwritten by the next saved setting.

TFStudio 1.8.0

Changelog

v1.8.0

Numbers change in this release (neglibily in most cases): the E-field profile at an angle, the GD, GDD and TOD curves at a material's table points, and R + T inside an absorbing medium. Filter Design is rebuilt around the angle you design for, so a passband holds its shape there, and a search finishes in a fraction of the time.

Added

• Electric Field: the window now opens on field amplitude in V/m for a 1 W/m² beam, the reading a damage threshold is quoted against, and the vertical axis can also read the squared field as a fraction of the incident or in absolute units, split into the component along the layers and the one normal to them; the depth axis can read optical distance instead of physical depth, in nanometres, quarter waves or full waves, measured at the design's reference wavelength or at one you type.
• Measured Ellipsometry: Fit… on a Ψ/Δ pair turns the measurement into merit-function targets, so Refinement can fit the design's thicknesses to it; the targets draw on the Ellipsometry plot and can hand the curves back, as a measured spectrum's target does. They are scaled to what a spectroscopic ellipsometer resolves, so a Ψ/Δ miss and a reflectance miss of the same quality count alike, and they carry exact derivatives, so a fit does not slow down with the layer count.
• Group Delay and Material Dispersion: CDC, the chromatic dispersion coefficient, joins phase, GD, GDD and TOD on the plot, the table and the report block. It is the same dispersion as GDD read per nanometre of wavelength, which is how telecommunications specifications are written.
• Filter Design: a new field holds the passband over an extra angle on top of the one the filter is designed for; the plots switch between a linear and a logarithmic transmittance axis and draw the points a design is scored against; the candidate list survives a second search, so two seeds can be compared side by side; and the wizard reopens on the materials, specification and angle you used last.

Changed

• Filter Design: the oblique incidence angle on the first page now designs the filter, so its passband lands on the wavelength you asked for at that angle and holds its shape there instead of sitting tens of nanometres below it, and the polarization you pick decides the design, since at a steep angle the two planes no longer share a passband. It runs on the same accelerated kernel the rest of the app uses, which it never did before, so a search finishes in a fraction of the time; a design is scored against the two half-widths the specification states instead of a flat top held all the way to the band edge, so a filter that uses its passband allowance is no longer punished for it and the search returns designs that meet the rejection width rather than ones that overshoot it; mirrors of any layer count are built and searched, not only odd ones; the search now reaches the higher-order spacer designs it used to stall short of; the prototype table and the final air-matching layers no longer take seconds to appear after every change, and those matching layers now agree with the ones OptiLayer computes; and Finish works from the prototype you picked without having to run the search first.
• Opening a window twice now gives two windows rather than two views of one. Each copy keeps its own controls, so two Optical Evaluation windows can hold different wavelength ranges, angles and curves and two Group Delay windows can show GD and GDD side by side, and a window you close and open again starts from the defaults you saved instead of from the last band you were looking at.
• Material Editor: the smooth dispersion fit has its own wavelength range, kept with the fit and starting at the range the design is evaluated over instead of covering the whole table; a range spanning more than a decade of photon energy is called out, with a narrower one offered together with the residual it would reach.

Fixed

• Electric Field: the p-polarized profile at an angle read up to four times high at 60 degrees and drew a null where the field is not small; it now matches Essential Macleod, and a merit target on the field reads the corrected value too.
• Group Delay and Material Dispersion: the GD, GDD and TOD curves no longer break at a material table point. The jump is drawn as a step through the value on each side; the curves also carry on past the end of a material's data, over a shaded band that names the material, instead of stopping dead there, and the table marks those rows so an exported number is never silently an extrapolation.
• A design lit from inside an absorbing medium, such as a cemented cube, no longer shows R + T above 1 at an angle.
• Importing an Essential Macleod design whose file rounds its wavelength unit no longer makes every layer a trace too thin; the stack now matches the program.
• A material table with a k below zero no longer gives the layer gain: calculations read k = 0 there, the Material Editor marks the rows, and the import dialog says how many a file brings in.
• Monochromatic monitoring no longer labels the deposition rate in nanometres per second. It is entered and simulated in ångströms per second, so a rate typed against the old label ran ten times slow.
• A Δ merit target next to the 0°/360° wrap is now scored the short way round, so refinement no longer pulls the design the long way round.
• Material Editor: a metal fit can no longer drive ε∞ below 1, and it now says when a fitted parameter ended on one of the model's limits or when an oscillator does nothing the data can see.
• The refractiveindex.info browser states the wavelength range a material will actually be imported over, instead of the wider one the database record declares. An infrared record could offer a thousand micrometres and deliver twenty.
• Spectrum Exchange: importing a measured spectrum, or opening the window on a design that already has one, no longer blanks the app.
• A window that fails now says so in its own pane and offers to reopen, instead of taking the whole app to a blank page.
• Docking a torn-off window back no longer resets its controls.
• Coating Library and Report keep their translated names in the window tabs instead of falling back to English.

TFStudio 1.7.4

Important

Rebuilt 12 September 2026. In the first 1.7.4 build, importing a measured spectrum in Spectrum Exchange blanked the app. That is fixed. If you downloaded 1.7.4 before this date, download it again.

Changelog

v1.7.4

Added

• Italian language added in UI. Machine-translated, so corrections are welcome.
• The optimizer windows and the Merit Function Editor warn when the targets reach outside a material's data range, as the analysis windows already do.
• n,k Characterization: while an extraction runs, the control row shows which stage it is at and how long it has been running.
• GD/GDD: targets can be drawn, dragged and deleted on the plot, as in Optical Evaluation. A click adds a target at one wavelength; a drag across a band adds a flatness target.
• DevTools opens from the View menu, or with Ctrl+Shift+I, in installed builds as well as development ones, so a problem can be looked at and reported where it happened.
• Double-clicking a design in Explorer or a Linux file manager opens it in TFStudio, in the copy already running if there is one; the Windows installer and the Debian package set this up, the portable builds do not. A design already in your projects opens as itself, and one from anywhere else is copied into your projects first.

Changed

• n,k Characterization: Drude-Lorentz fits run about three times as fast with the thickness solved.

Fixed

• Localized hardcoded UI strings.
• A damaged or hand-edited design file says what is wrong with it instead of opening to a blank window, and one bad file in a project folder no longer stops the rest of the folder loading.
• n,k Characterization: a metal fitted with the thickness held no longer comes back as plain Drude when the spectrum needs Lorentz terms; the oscillator count is chosen the same way whether the thickness is held or solved.

TFStudio 1.7.3

Changelog

v1.7.3

Added

• Merit Function Editor: the table works like a spreadsheet. Cells select by dragging or with Shift and Ctrl and rows from the row-number column, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V move a single value or a block of them, every row operation is on a right-click menu with its shortcut, and Type and Pol are cells you type into.
• Explorer: project folders hold folders as well as designs, to any depth. A folder or a design moves by being dragged onto another folder, onto the space below the tree to bring it back to the top level, or from its right-click menu.

Changed

• n,k Characterization: the Sample setting is gone, since the window only ever fitted a film on a substrate polished on both faces. Drude is gone from the model list too, because Drude-Lorentz covers the same metals and takes the number of oscillators from the data. Documentation now describes how to work with this feature more clearly.
• Report: rebuilt from the ground up as a docked window that follows the design as it is edited. Blocks take their settings from the analysis window they mirror, templates replace presets, several designs print as one lettered comparison instead of a report each, and branding, paper size and language are set once for every report.
• Merit Function Editor: the wizard is a three-box form that keeps its shape whichever preset is picked, folds away behind a chevron and remembers its settings; saved merit functions load and save from the table's own bar.
• Material and operand pickers open on the full list with the current entry centred and its category marked, instead of filtered to that category.
• Explorer: a design name only has to be free in the project folder it goes into, so the same name can be used in more than one folder. New designs number from 1 in each folder.
• Settings: one data folder replaces the separate paths for designs, materials and presets, and changing it moves your files there. Paths set in earlier versions are no longer used.

Fixed

• Light themes: panel dividers, control outlines and operand row colours are more visible.
• Keyboard shortcuts work on a non-Latin keyboard layout and with Caps Lock on; Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes.
• Every wavelength axis spans exactly the range computed instead of starting at a round number below it.
• Merit Function Editor: a table of thousands of operands opens, scrolls and redraws as quickly as a short one; typing goes where the cursor is; a single number in a target row sets a flat target instead of leaving the old end value behind as a ramp; and preset block headers name the bands the preset was actually built from.
• Material picker: the search box keeps its focus and keeps up with typing, however many catalogs are installed.
• n,k Characterization: a metal, and a film thick enough that several thicknesses reproduce the measurement, come back as the film that was measured instead of a matching spectrum over the wrong index. A measurement that cannot see the thickness says the value was assumed rather than reporting it as measured, and a spectrum of the coated surface alone is named as such instead of failing to invert.
• Material Editor: a material saved from n,k Characterization opens instead of taking the application down.
• Optical Evaluation: a merit function of thousands of targets draws and resizes without stalling the window, and a range covered by many of them keeps one shade so the curves behind stay readable. A drawn target is set to the angle picked in the drawing bar instead of always landing at normal incidence.
• Torn-off windows: dropdowns and menus open in the right place, close when you click away and follow the theme; a dialog a tool asks for opens over that window instead of the main one. On a Wayland session one can be dragged, though docking it back has to go through the Dock button on its strip.

TFStudio 1.7.2

Changelog

v1.7.2

Added

• Coating Library: a new window in the Design group holds coatings as reusable stacks, yours and a built-in set of checked starting designs, searchable by type, tags, substrate and wavelength. Each shows its spectrum and can be placed on the front or back of the active design.
• Design Editor: the Tools menu can save the front or back coating into the Coating Library.
• Coating Library: Share a coating… offers one of your coatings for the built-in library, as a prefilled GitHub post, an email or a file.
• Process Exporter: a witness-chip mode writes each chip's spectra to its own folder, following the chip plan from the Monitor Worksheet; a warning shows when the spectral range runs past a material's measured data, with an offer to pull it back.
• Material Editor: imports TFCalc and Essential Macleod material files alongside OptiLayer, interpolated between their points the way those programs do it, with an n/k preview before a material is added to a catalog.
• Setup tab: an Import button reads TFCalc, Essential Macleod and OptiLayer design files into a project, matching their materials to your catalogs and previewing each design before it is added. Rugate designs are refused for now.
• Design import: a TFCalc design keeps its wavelength unit and, where TFCalc did, is evaluated with both substrate surfaces; an OptiLayer design keeps the materials from its folder unless you pick a catalog material; an Essential Macleod design takes its materials from the program's own database on the computer, with a button to point at the folder when it is elsewhere.
• Design import: a material matched from your catalogs is marked as matched on name alone, with the file's own index shown beside it where the file has one; a design in optical thickness says the material you pick sets its layer thicknesses.
• Optical Evaluation: the vertical axis can be shown in decibels or optical density, so a blocking band is legible; density applies to transmittance only.
• Material Editor: a tabulated material has a switch between cubic and linear interpolation of its points; the choice travels with the material inside a design, and GD/GDD curves break at the table points under linear.

Changed

• Material Editor: the chart spans the material's own wavelength range; type a wavelength under it to read n and k, beside a sampled n, k table. Wavelength limits keep their decimals.
• Material Editor: the Cauchy and general Sellmeier formulas take any number of terms, added with a button in the form; their names no longer carry an OptiLayer prefix.
• Monitor Worksheet: the Crystal column shows the thickness on every layer and highlights the layers the crystal has to carry.
• Process Exporter: polarization, angle, spectral range and export step moved behind a Settings button and the witness-chip controls into the sidebar, so the control row no longer wraps on resize.
• Stack Formula: a coefficient can sit inside a run of symbols, so LHLHL6HLHLH parses without spaces; Start from substrate is now on by default.

Fixed

• Design Editor: the stack diagram and the OT, QW and FW columns now read a material that travels inside the design instead of treating it as air; a material that resolves nowhere shows a dash.
• Monitoring windows: the witness chip is monitored in air whatever medium the design is embedded in, so a filter designed between two glasses no longer shows a monitor signal near 100 %.
• Monitor Worksheet: a layer the monitor cannot see, such as silica on a silica chip or one deep in a saturated stopband, now reports no turning points and an infinite Δd, and no longer decides the chip's Auto λ.
• Process Exporter: spectra on screen and in the .res files are computed with the part or chip in air, whatever medium the design is embedded in; saving the .res files of a design with hundreds of layers is many times faster and no longer freezes the window.
• Torn-off windows: dragging a window by its title bar no longer shakes or jumps, and the window keeps its exact size on the way instead of nudging its controls about.
• Torn-off windows: the divider between a table and its plot can be dragged, and a plot's scrollbar handle or zoom box lets go where the mouse does instead of sticking to it.

TFStudio 1.7.1

Do you use an ellipsometer? This release imports measured Ψ and Δ, and I want it to read your instrument's files exactly as exported. Share a sample file in issue #66 and the format gets supported.

Changelog

v1.7.1

Added

• Monitoring windows: an absolute noise floor joins the relative signal error, so a wavelength where the signal has died scores as unusable instead of noiseless.
• Monochromatic Monitoring Wizard: one wavelength and one termination strategy can be set on the whole run at once.
• Wavelength vs Angle: a new analysis window maps T, R or A over a wavelength range and an angle range at once, as a heatmap or a rotatable surface.

Changed

• Every analysis window that sweeps a wavelength range now warns when it reaches past a material's measured data and offers to pull the range back; windows that work at a single wavelength offer the same for that wavelength.
• Plot Engine: the curve and surface panels now use the same controls as the rest of the analysis windows.
• Monitor Worksheet: Layers per chip now goes up to the whole run, so direct monitoring on a single chip can be planned; long runs also compute much faster.
• Monochromatic Monitoring Wizard: the per-layer monitoring plan has its own page; Auto λ now plans wavelength and termination strategy together, and is much faster on long designs.
• Process Exporter and the Broadband Monitoring Wizard compute much faster on designs with many layers.

Fixed

• A 3D surface now draws each swept axis over the range it was swept, instead of squeezing the data into a corner of the box.
• A surface with a point it could not compute now colours the rest of the map normally, instead of flattening every cell to one colour.
• Surfaces and heatmaps: the colour bar fills the plot and names the value on hover; both redraw much faster and no longer trail behind a window resize.
• Plot Engine: number fields in the curve and surface panels can be cleared and retyped.
• The Monitor Worksheet and Process Exporter charts no longer lag on designs with hundreds of layers.
• Monochromatic Monitoring Wizard: running the simulation on a design with hundreds of layers no longer freezes the app.
• Monitoring wizards: the layer buttons scroll on long designs instead of running off the page, and the selected layer stays in view during playback.
• Monitoring wizard signal previews: the readout can now land exactly on the marked cut line instead of hopping over it.

TFStudio 1.7.0

Do you use an ellipsometer? This release imports measured Ψ and Δ, and I want it to read your instrument's files exactly as exported. Share a sample file in issue #66 and the format gets supported.

Changelog

v1.7.0

Added

• Layer Thicknesses: a new analysis window that draws every layer as a bar in its material's color, with the thickness axis in nm, optical thickness, QWOT or FWOT.
• Tear-off windows: drag a window's tab anywhere that is not a docking target and it becomes its own window you can put on a second monitor Drag it back over the layout to dock it, or use the dock button on its title bar.
• Monitor Worksheet: a new window that says whether the design can be terminated on an optical monitor. It divides the run across witness chips, picks a monitoring wavelength for each, and flags the layers that cannot be stopped closely enough.
• n,k Characterization: a new window that derives a film's index, extinction and thickness from a measured transmittance and reflectance, or from an ellipsometric Ψ and Δ pair. It says how far the model is from the measurement, and names the conditions under which a small residual is still describing the wrong film; the result saves as a material, or as a design that reproduces the measurement it was fitted to.
• Measured Spectra: fit a design to an imported measured curve. The fit becomes one row in the merit function, and you choose whether it uses the measured points as they are, every Nth of them, or an even wavelength step.
• Measured Spectra: a curve records the angle of incidence, polarization and side it was measured at, and the fit refuses a curve measured on the side the design is not evaluated on.
• Measured Spectra: measured curves export in nanometres, micrometres or wavenumber, as a fraction or a percentage, and you pick which curves go in the file.
• Measured Ellipsometry: a new window that imports a measured Ψ and Δ pair from a spectroscopic ellipsometer, including a file whose axis is photon energy in eV and one that repeats its wavelengths for several angles of incidence. The pair is drawn over the calculated curves on the ellipsometry plot, and measured or calculated Ψ/Δ export as CSV.
• A splash screen while the app starts, showing the version.

Changed

• Mono Simulator: the monitor signal now reads through the whole witness chip, bare back face included, and the chip's glass can be set separately from the design substrate.
• BBM Simulator: the same witness-chip signal and chip glass choice as the Mono Simulator.
• Measured Spectra: rebuilt to match the analysis windows. The preview is a real chart of the measurement against the design, and an imported curve can be renamed, recoloured, retyped, rescaled and trimmed without importing it again.
• Optical Evaluation: the plot dims the wavelengths that fall outside a material's data range, with the material named in the band. The out-of-range warning gains a button that sets the range to where every material has data.
• The ribbon is now five tabs: Setup, Analysis, Optimization, Production and Help. The tolerance and needle tools are laid out on the tab instead of hidden in a dropdown, and double-clicking the open tab collapses the ribbon.
• A search box on the tab strip finds a tool by name from any tab and opens it.
• The menu bar is gone. New, Open, Save, Undo and Redo are on the Setup tab and repeated in the title bar; the welcome tour, tutorials, documentation, About and the update check are on the Help tab; layouts and fullscreen are under the logo.
• Settings is now a Preferences button on the Setup tab, and the dialog is rebuilt: each setting is one row with its control beside it, instead of a stack that left most of the window empty.
• Preferences gained a Quick Access page: choose which tools sit in the title bar and in what order. The list is kept with the other preferences, so a reinstall does not take it with it.
• Dropping a window's tab on the docking compass shows where it will land before you let go.
• The portable build starts much faster.

Fixed

• Ctrl+O opens a design file. It was listed as a shortcut but did nothing, as were Ctrl+N, Ctrl+, and Ctrl+1.
• The readout lists every curve at the wavelength under the pointer. A measured curve is on the instrument's wavelength step, so between the design's samples the readout showed the measurement alone, and on them the design alone.
• The app no longer opens in the light theme for a moment before switching to yours, and the window edge no longer flashes white while being resized.
• Preferences and the Design Editor tool dialogs no longer close when you click beside them.
• Merit Function Editor: the Add and Delete buttons above the operand table are translated.
• Mono Simulator: a thin layer cut on a level no longer converges to a slightly wrong thickness even with a perfect monitor.
• Measured Spectra: a column headed R% is read as reflectance, and the import now says how many rows in the file held no value.
• Measured Spectra: PerkinElmer ASCII exports no longer read their own header settings as the start of the spectrum.
• Measured Spectra: files that tag every data row, and headers split into a name row and a unit row, import correctly instead of being rejected or misnamed.
• Wavelength plots keep a readable grid whatever they span. An axis reading far outside the usual few hundred nanometres lost its labels entirely, and the Integral Values overlay drew a gridline every 50 nm however wide the range.
• Ellipsometry Evaluation: hiding Ψ left the plot with no grid lines at all. The grid now follows whichever curve is on screen.
• Ellipsometry Evaluation: the second Δ convention was labelled "Woollam", which is not what a Woollam instrument writes. It is now "360° − Δ", and both options say what they are for. The default is unchanged and still matches measurement files.
• Design Editor: the layer right-click menu and the drag handle are translated.
• Whole-sample spectra are now fast at every angle of incidence, not only at normal.
• Ellipsometry Evaluation redraws several times faster, in both the wavelength sweep and the angle sweep.
• The portable build keeps your preferences, window layout and theme between runs, and no longer shows the welcome screen at every launch.