added whats new doc

jdh2358 · jdh2358 · commit 175f28e80576 · 2008-12-10T03:57:09.000Z
svn path=/trunk/matplotlib/; revision=6538
diff --git a/doc/_templates/indexsidebar.html b/doc/_templates/indexsidebar.html
@@ -1,10 +1,11 @@
 <h3>Download</h3>
 <p>Current version: <b>{{ version }}</b></p>
 
-<p>Download matplotlib from the
-sourceforge <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib">project</a>
-page (but first take a look at the <a href="{{
-pathto('users/installing') }}">installing</a> page).</p>
+<p>Download matplotlib from the sourceforge <a
+href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib">project</a> page
+(but first take a look at the <a href="{{ pathto('users/installing')
+}}">installing</a> page).  Here's a summary of <a href="{{
+pathto('users/whats_new') }}">what's new</a>. </p>
 
 <p>There are several matplotlib addon <a href="{{
 pathto('users/toolkits') }}">toolkits</a>, including the projection
diff --git a/doc/users/index.rst b/doc/users/index.rst
@@ -24,6 +24,7 @@ User's Guide
     plotting.rst
     toolkits.rst
     screenshots.rst
+    whats_new.rst
     license.rst
     credits.rst
 
diff --git a/doc/users/whats_new.rst b/doc/users/whats_new.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,248 @@
+.. _whats-new:
+
+***************************
+What's new in matplotlib
+***************************
+
+.. _whats-new-0-98-4:
+
+What new in matplotlib 0.98.4
+==============================
+
+It's been four months since the last matplotlib release, and there are
+a lot of new features and bug-fixes
+
+.. _legend-refactor:
+
+Legend enhancements
+--------------------
+
+Jae-Joon has rewritten the legend class, and added support for
+multiple columns and rows, as well as fancy box drawing.  See
+:ref:`pylab_examples-legend_demo3`.
+
+
+.. _fancy-annotations:
+
+Fancy annotations and arrows
+-----------------------------
+
+Jae-Joon has added lot's of support to annotations for drawing fancy
+boxes and connectors in annotations.  See
+:ref:`pylab_examples-annotation_demo2` and
+:ref:`pylab_examples-fancyarrow_demo`.
+
+.. _psd-amplitude:
+
+psd amplitude scaling
+-------------------------
+
+Ryan May did a lot of work to rationalize the amplitude scaling of
+:func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.psd` and friends.  See
+:ref:`pylab_examples-psd_demo2`. and :ref:`pylab_examples-psd_demo3`.
+The changes should increase `MATLAB™ <http://www.mathworks.com>`
+compatabililty and increase scaling options.
+
+.. _fill-between:
+
+Fill between
+------------------
+
+Added a :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.fill_between` function to make it
+easier to do shaded region plots in the presence of masked data.  See
+:ref:`pylab_examples-fill_between`.
+
+Lots more
+-----------
+
+Here are the 0.98.4 notes from the CHANGELOG::
+
+    Added mdehoon's native macosx backend from sf patch 2179017 - JDH
+
+    Removed the prints in the set_*style commands.  Return the list of
+    pprinted strings instead - JDH
+
+    Some of the changes Michael made to improve the output of the
+    property tables in the rest docs broke of made difficult to use
+    some of the interactive doc helpers, eg setp and getp.  Having all
+    the rest markup in the ipython shell also confused the docstrings.
+    I added a new rc param docstring.harcopy, to format the docstrings
+    differently for hardcopy and other use.  Ther ArtistInspector
+    could use a little refactoring now since there is duplication of
+    effort between the rest out put and the non-rest output - JDH
+
+    Updated spectral methods (psd, csd, etc.) to scale one-sided
+    densities by a factor of 2 and, optionally, scale all densities by
+    the sampling frequency.  This gives better MatLab
+    compatibility. -RM
+
+    Fixed alignment of ticks in colorbars. -MGD
+
+    drop the deprecated "new" keyword of np.histogram() for numpy 1.2
+    or later.  -JJL
+
+    Fixed a bug in svg backend that new_figure_manager() ignores
+    keywords arguments such as figsize, etc. -JJL
+
+    Fixed a bug that the handlelength of the new legend class set too
+    short when numpoints=1 -JJL
+
+    Added support for data with units (e.g. dates) to
+    Axes.fill_between. -RM
+
+    Added fancybox keyword to legend. Also applied some changes for
+    better look, including baseline adjustment of the multiline texts
+    so that it is center aligned. -JJL
+
+    The transmuter classes in the patches.py are reorganized as
+    subclasses of the Style classes. A few more box and arrow styles
+    are added. -JJL
+
+    Fixed a bug in the new legend class that didn't allowed a tuple of
+    coordinate vlaues as loc. -JJL
+
+    Improve checks for external dependencies, using subprocess
+    (instead of deprecated popen*) and distutils (for version
+    checking) - DSD
+
+    Reimplementaion of the legend which supports baseline alignement,
+    multi-column, and expand mode. - JJL
+
+    Fixed histogram autoscaling bug when bins or range are given
+    explicitly (fixes Debian bug 503148) - MM
+
+    Added rcParam axes.unicode_minus which allows plain hypen for
+    minus when False - JDH
+
+    Added scatterpoints support in Legend. patch by Erik Tollerud -
+    JJL
+
+    Fix crash in log ticking. - MGD
+
+    Added static helper method BrokenHBarCollection.span_where and
+    Axes/pyplot method fill_between.  See
+    examples/pylab/fill_between.py - JDH
+
+    Add x_isdata and y_isdata attributes to Artist instances, and use
+    them to determine whether either or both coordinates are used when
+    updating dataLim.  This is used to fix autoscaling problems that
+    had been triggered by axhline, axhspan, axvline, axvspan. - EF
+
+    Update the psd(), csd(), cohere(), and specgram() methods of Axes
+    and the csd() cohere(), and specgram() functions in mlab to be in
+    sync with the changes to psd().  In fact, under the hood, these
+    all call the same core to do computations. - RM
+
+    Add 'pad_to' and 'sides' parameters to mlab.psd() to allow
+    controlling of zero padding and returning of negative frequency
+    components, respecitively.  These are added in a way that does not
+    change the API. - RM
+
+    Fix handling of c kwarg by scatter; generalize is_string_like to
+    accept numpy and numpy.ma string array scalars. - RM and EF
+
+    Fix a possible EINTR problem in dviread, which might help when
+    saving pdf files from the qt backend. - JKS
+
+    Fix bug with zoom to rectangle and twin axes - MGD
+
+    Added Jae Joon's fancy arrow, box and annotation enhancements --
+    see examples/pylab_examples/annotation_demo2.py
+
+    Autoscaling is now supported with shared axes - EF
+
+    Fixed exception in dviread that happened with Minion - JKS
+
+    set_xlim, ylim now return a copy of the viewlim array to avoid
+    modify inplace surprises
+
+    Added image thumbnail generating function
+    matplotlib.image.thumbnail.  See examples/misc/image_thumbnail.py
+    - JDH
+
+    Applied scatleg patch based on ideas and work by Erik Tollerud and
+    Jae-Joon Lee. - MM
+
+    Fixed bug in pdf backend: if you pass a file object for output
+    instead of a filename, e.g. in a wep app, we now flush the object
+    at the end. - JKS
+
+    Add path simplification support to paths with gaps. - EF
+
+    Fix problem with AFM files that don't specify the font's full name
+    or family name. - JKS
+
+    Added 'scilimits' kwarg to Axes.ticklabel_format() method, for
+    easy access to the set_powerlimits method of the major
+    ScalarFormatter. - EF
+
+    Experimental new kwarg borderpad to replace pad in legend, based
+    on suggestion by Jae-Joon Lee.  - EF
+
+    Allow spy to ignore zero values in sparse arrays, based on patch
+    by Tony Yu.  Also fixed plot to handle empty data arrays, and
+    fixed handling of markers in figlegend. - EF
+
+    Introduce drawstyles for lines. Transparently split linestyles
+    like 'steps--' into drawstyle 'steps' and linestyle '--'.  Legends
+    always use drawstyle 'default'. - MM
+
+    Fixed quiver and quiverkey bugs (failure to scale properly when
+    resizing) and added additional methods for determining the arrow
+    angles - EF
+
+    Fix polar interpolation to handle negative values of theta - MGD
+
+    Reorganized cbook and mlab methods related to numerical
+    calculations that have little to do with the goals of those two
+    modules into a separate module numerical_methods.py Also, added
+    ability to select points and stop point selection with keyboard in
+    ginput and manual contour labeling code.  Finally, fixed contour
+    labeling bug. - DMK
+
+    Fix backtick in Postscript output. - MGD
+
+    [ 2089958 ] Path simplification for vector output backends
+    Leverage the simplification code exposed through path_to_polygons
+    to simplify certain well-behaved paths in the vector backends
+    (PDF, PS and SVG).  "path.simplify" must be set to True in
+    matplotlibrc for this to work.  - MGD
+
+    Add "filled" kwarg to Path.intersects_path and
+    Path.intersects_bbox. - MGD
+
+    Changed full arrows slightly to avoid an xpdf rendering problem
+    reported by Friedrich Hagedorn. - JKS
+
+    Fix conversion of quadratic to cubic Bezier curves in PDF and PS
+    backends. Patch by Jae-Joon Lee. - JKS
+
+    Added 5-point star marker to plot command q- EF
+
+    Fix hatching in PS backend - MGD
+
+    Fix log with base 2 - MGD
+
+    Added support for bilinear interpolation in
+    NonUniformImage; patch by Gregory Lielens. - EF
+
+    Added support for multiple histograms with data of
+    different length - MM
+
+    Fix step plots with log scale - MGD
+
+    Fix masked arrays with markers in non-Agg backends - MGD
+
+    Fix clip_on kwarg so it actually works correctly - MGD
+
+    Fix locale problems in SVG backend - MGD
+
+    fix quiver so masked values are not plotted - JSW
+
+    improve interactive pan/zoom in qt4 backend on windows - DSD
+
+    Fix more bugs in NaN/inf handling.  In particular, path
+    simplification (which does not handle NaNs or infs) will be turned
+    off automatically when infs or NaNs are present.  Also masked
+    arrays are now converted to arrays with NaNs for consistent
+    handling of masks and NaNs - MGD and EF
