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Release of gnuplot version 4.6

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		   GNUPLOT VERSION 4.6
	    ===================================

The gnuplot team are happy to announce release of gnuplot version 4.6. 
This version is a major release with significant new capabilities
and enhancements added since release of the previous major version (4.4)
in March 2010. Incremental releases are put out roughly twice a year.

Particularly noteworthy features include:

- New syntax supporting multi-line blocks of code delimited by curly braces
     if (<condition>) { ... } else { ... }
     do for [<iteration-spec>] { ... }
     while (<condition>) { ... }

- Time formats can handle fractional seconds to microsecond precision.

- User-definable linetypes that can be used to establish a locally
  preferred default sequence of colors or dash/thickness/point styles.

- Statistical summary of the data to be plotted (new command "stats")

- New terminal drivers:  qt  context  epscairo  cairolatex

- The version for Windows received major improvements
  (GUI, help, native terminal and wxt)

- Improved support for UTF-8, SJIS and other multi-byte encodings

The NEWS file contains a longer list of changes since the previous release.
Full information is given in the ChangeLog.


		 NOTES TO PACKAGERS AND TESTERS 
		===============================

Configuration options for interactive use
-----------------------------------------

The 4.6 source code supports three primary cross-platform output modes
in addition to several platform-specific modes.

1) Cairo/pango/wxWidgets
   These terminals were introduced in version 4.4 and are now the most
   stable and full-featured option.  This set of terminals includes
   - pngcairo, pdfcairo, epscairo, and cairolatex for output to a file
   - wxt for interactive display
   This is the default configuration, but requires installation of
   libcairo, libpango, libcairo, libwxgtk, and related support libraries
   To disable these terminals:
       ./configure --disable-wxt --without-cairo

2) Qt
   The new qt terminal supports interactive display, with menu-driven
   output to png, svg or pdf.
   Requires libqt version >= 4.5
       ./configure --enable-qt

3) X11 (the "classic" interactive interface)
   This used to be the preferred interactive interface, but the newer
   wxt and qt terminals offer nicer output and a wider range of features.


Options for output to files
---------------------------

Of course the terminals (output modes) present in previous gnuplot versions
are also still available. These include, among many more obscure options:
- png/jpeg/gif output via libgd
- PostScript
- Many flavors of TeX/LaTeX output, including TikZ and ConTeXt (new)
- Bitmapped output to support many older devices (e.g. HP deskjet, epson,
  seiko printers, pbm bitmapped graphics files) is available if needed
  but is no longer configured in by default.  Note that the bitmap code
  copyright is more restrictive than the rest of the gnuplot code.
      ./configure --with-bitmap-terminals

Options for generating interactive plots for web display
--------------------------------------------------------

- Mouseable output for display on the web can be created using either 
  the canvas terminal (HTML5 2D canvas element) or the svg terminal.
  Both allow zooming, toggling plot elements on/off, and user-scriptable
  hot keys.

Online demo plots
-----------------

Demo plots illustrating new and old features are online at

	http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/


		          OTHER NOTES
		===============================

Installation
------------

You can download a source tarball for gnuplot version 4.6.0 from the 
gnuplot development site on SourceForge.

	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2055

Installation instructions are available in the source itself; the short
version for linux/unix-like systems is to unpack the tarball and then
build it:
		cd gnuplot-4.6.0 ; ./configure ; make
test it:
		make check
install it:
		make install

Pay careful attention to the output of the ./configure script.
It may indicate that some output drivers have been omitted because the
necessary support libraries were not found.  In general you need to have
previously installed the "*-devel-*" versions of these libraries. 


Known issues
------------

- Mac OSX ships with a terminal input library that appears to be GNU
libreadline, but isn't really.  The program tries to cope with this, but
you may get better results by configuring gnuplot to use either its own
built-in readline routines or the real GNU libreadline.

- The gnuplot build system is not very good at figuring out where to find
or install LaTeX-related files.  This can affect use of the new lua/tikz
and ConTeXt terminals.

- Alpha-channel support in aquaterm requires aquaterm version 1.0.1 or
newer, available from http://aquaterm.sourceforge.net.  Aquaterm does
not support mousing.  Autoconfiguration of aquaterm support is still a
work in progress.  If you can help, please do!

- You can configure support for both wxt and qt into the same gnuplot
executable, but only one of these two output modes can be used in any
given gnuplot session.


Support
-------
Please report all bugs and installation problems to the bug tracker
on SourceForge:

	http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=2055&atid=102055

There is also an gnuplot discussion forum on usenet group

	comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot


Development
-----------
Gnuplot development is quite active. The development branch on SourceForge
contains preliminary implementations of many new features.  Following the
release of gnuplot 4.6, the development branch will be identified as 
version 4.7.  Feedback and contributions of code are very welcome.

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Release of gnuplot version 4.6 sfeam <sfeam@users.sourceforge.net> - 2012-03-12 20:02 -0700

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