The optical design and engineering package OPTOLAB

A not yet commercially available optical design and engineering software is presented. This software, developed in Visual Fortran, takes advantage of win32 development environment. Among many others features, a major one with respect to other software is that it allows to easily model and understand the behaviour of optical systems by immediate and automatic direct updating of Layout, Spot Diagrams and other output windows as any change in database is done. Together with an easy method and a wide set of tilt and decentring modes, it renders easy to design and understand the effects of decentring optical elements. Optimisation is based on dumped least square method, and it can be done by using aberrations set as axial symmetrical or generalised Seidel, Spot, MTF, Strehl Ratios and Zernike polynomials of wavefront. Other features are available such as Ghost and Narcissus, Montecarlo analysis of tolerances, III order analysis of Seidel aberrations, a set of facilities dedicated to particular problems like scattering, grating efficiency evaluation, I order optical system modelling and shadows design and so on. A lot of new developments are in progress, as not sequential ray tracing.