Here is one way of doing what I suggested in the email about the extraction of the 2D data from the POP file dumped by Zemax.

create2DListFromZemaxTextData.py

import pyzdde.zdde as pyz
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import re

# Helper functions
def _getStartLine(line_list, pattern):
    """return the line number that is the starting line
    for the data of interest, identified by the regex
    pattern
    """
    pat = re.compile(pattern)
    for line_num, line in enumerate(line_list):
        if re.match(pat, line.strip()):
            return line_num

def _get2DList(line_list, start_line, number_of_lines):
    """returns a 2D list of data read
    
    Parameters
    ----------
    line_list : list
        list of lines read from a file
    start_line : integer
        index of line_list 
    number_of_lines : integer
    """
    data = []
    end_line = start_line + number_of_lines
    for lineNum, row in enumerate(line_list):
        if start_line <= lineNum <= end_line:
            data.append(row.split('\t'))
    return data

# To test the helper functions
_readLinesFromFile = pyz._readLinesFromFile
_openFile = pyz._openFile
txtFileName = r'C:\PROGRAMSANDEXPERIMENTS\PYTHON\OPTICS\zemaxInteractions\POPInfo.txt' # substitute this file with your own
line_list = _readLinesFromFile(_openFile(txtFileName))
# get data in the form of 2D list
pattern = r'(-*\d\.\d{4,6}[Ee][-\+]\d{3}\s*)' + r'{{{num}}}'.format(num=128) # 128 was set in POP settings in Zemax
start_line = _getStartLine(line_list, pattern)
data = _get2DList(line_list, start_line, 128)
# plot
npdata = np.array(data, dtype=np.float32)
plt.imshow(npdata)
plt.show()