Kst 2.0.6 released!

[Nicolas Brisset]

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Kst 2.0.6 released July 27th 2012

The Kst team is happy to announce the immediate availability of version 2.0.6 of the plotting tool Kst. This version is a bugfix release of the recent feature-packed 2.0.5 release. Packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/kst/files/Kst%202.0.6/, as well as the complete source code and cmake-based build files. 
Some Linux distributions also provide packages in their own or add-on repositories, updates should appear in the next days.

A more detailed presentation of Kst can be found on the web page at http://kst-plot.kde.org, including numerous screenshots and all the useful download links.

Kst is characterized by the following features:
- Outstanding performance: curves with millions of points are no problem at all!
- Plotting of live streams
- Out-of-the box support for a variety of formats (currently ASCII, netCDF, dirfile, Qimage-supported types, fits images)
- User-friendly with a modern and consistent user interface
- A set of unique tools to boost efficiency, including a fantastic data import wizard , capacity to edit multiple objects at once or the "Change Data File" tool to compare multiple experiments easily
- An active community
- Easily expandable for new data formats or data analysis algorithms thanks to a plugin-based architecture
- Available on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

The most notable improvements brought by Kst 2.0.6 over the 2.0.5 version released in May 2012 are one new feature (option to interpret a vector as EXCEL time) and a whole bunch of bugfixes:

1) Loading/saving
- When loading a kst file, prompt the user for an alternate if a datasource can't be found
- Save/use arrow head property defaults
- Don't invert Z order of viewItems which are direct children of the View
- Line and arrow dimensions were sometimes very far off
- Font and formatted text issues fixed
2) Data import
- Data wizard fixes (spectrum format, speed improvements when there are many vectors,
- Properly handle missing data in custom-delimited ASCII to avoid mixing the vectors
- Large speedup (x10!) for ASCII with very many columns
3) UI
- When leaving edit multiple mode, take the check boxes out of tristate mode
- Allow SVG and pixmap view objects to have adjustable aspect ratios
- Fix apply button in view item dialogs (including labels)
- Add a help window for label formatting (formatted text is quite powerful, but a bit hidden)
- Make sure the correct context menu is always shown

A more comprehensive list of changes between 2.0.5 and 2.0.6 can be found here: http://kst-plot.kde.org/files/Log_messages_2.0.5_to_2.0.6.txt

There was also quite a lot of work done on the compiling and packaging side by Peter Kümmel. Hopefully this will help packagers and in the end benefit numerous users. If you're a packager, we are interested in your feedback, both where to find your packages so that we can add links on the homepage, and whether there are issues we should fix in the build system.

Note that python scripting is not yet available on Windows, it compiles but does not work (yet). 

Work is already ongoing towards the next version, with emphasis on improving time-based analysis of your data. Stay tuned!

We hope you will enjoy this version. Don't hesitate to promote it among your friends and colleagues, and let's try to surpass the number of downloads of previous versions, which is showing a very nice trend :-)

The Kst Team
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