Highlights of this release include:

- Figure and Axes creation / management
    - subplots, subplot_mosaic accept height_ratios and width_ratios
      arguments
    - Constrained layout is no longer considered experimental
    - New layout_engine module
    - Compressed layout added for fixed-aspect ratio Axes
    - Layout engines may now be removed
    - Axes.inset_axes flexibility
    - WebP is now a supported output format
    - Garbage collection is no longer run on figure close
- Plotting methods
    - Striped lines (experimental)
    - Custom cap widths in box and whisker plots in bxp and boxplot
    - Easier labelling of bars in bar plot
    - New style format string for colorbar ticks
    - Linestyles for negative contours may be set individually
    - Improved quad contour calculations via ContourPy
    - errorbar supports markerfacecoloralt
    - streamplot can disable streamline breaks
    - New axis scale asinh (experimental)
    - stairs(..., fill=True) hides patch edge by setting linewidth
    - Fix the dash offset of the Patch class
    - Rectangle patch rotation point
- Colors and colormaps
    - Color sequence registry
    - Colormap method for creating a different lookup table size
    - Setting norms with strings
- Titles, ticks, and labels
    - plt.xticks and plt.yticks support *minor* keyword argument
- Legends
    - Legend can control alignment of title and handles
    - ncol keyword argument to legend renamed to ncols
- Markers
    - marker can now be set to the string "none"
    - Customization of MarkerStyle join and cap style
- Fonts and Text
    - Font fallback
    - List of available font names
    - math_to_image now has a *color* keyword argument
    - Active URL area rotates with link text
- rcParams improvements
    - Allow setting figure label size and weight globally and separately
      from title
    - Mathtext parsing can be disabled globally
    - Double-quoted strings in matplotlibrc
- 3D Axes improvements
    - Standardized views for primary plane viewing angles
    - Custom focal length for 3D camera
    - 3D plots gained a 3rd "roll" viewing angle
    - Equal aspect ratio for 3D plots
- Interactive tool improvements
    - Rotation, aspect ratio correction and add/remove state
    - MultiCursor now supports Axes split over multiple figures
    - PolygonSelector bounding boxes
    - Setting PolygonSelector vertices
    - SpanSelector widget can now be snapped to specified values
    - More toolbar icons are styled for dark themes
- Platform-specific changes
    - Wx backend uses standard toolbar
    - Improvements to macosx backend
        - Modifier keys handled more consistently
        - savefig.directory rcParam support
        - figure.raise_window rcParam support
        - Full-screen toggle support
        - Improved animation and blitting support
    - macOS application icon applied on Qt backend
    - New minimum macOS version
    - Windows on ARM support