[Kst] Kst 2.0.4 release announcement

[Nicolas Brisset]

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Kst 2.0.4 released September 13th 2011

The Kst team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Kst 2.0.4, a bugfix release of an outstanding open-source, cross-platform 2D plotting tool focused on performance and ease of use. Packages for Windows, various Linux distributions and Mac OS X are available, as well as the complete source code and cmake-based build files.
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 2.0.4 over the 2.0.3 version released in April 2011 are:
- A major re-write of the auto-layout command: it works much better now and no longer gets in the way
- Improvements to automatic legend names
- Fixes to the layout mode, with better visual feedback during drag operations
- Numerous other bugfixes and improvements (point density, scientific notation, issues with log mode, bar colors, fixed aspect ratio in images and svg annotation items)
- UI and usability improvements: for instance you can now just double-click on labels or axes to open the corresponding dialog
- The introduction of a Settings->Theme dialog which sets brush, stroke, and font for all view items, optionally applying to all existing objects, and/or saving as the default for all future objects
- A great new auto-completer for the the equation editor and label editor, including support for wildcards
- A number of crashes fixed in various plugins

For the upcoming Kst 2.1 series, currently under active development, and future releases, these are some of the new features we plan on implementing:
- Python-based, numPy and sciPy compatible scripting - use kst as a plotting device for python, or control a running kst session with python scripts!
- Improvements to the data view dialogs to allow a worksheet-based workflow as in labplot, qtiplot or Origin
- Better support for reading time and dates from ASCII files
- Data-fixed annotation objects (i.e. annotation which scroll along with the curves)

If you are interested in getting involved, just get in touch with us on the mailing list. We can offer support and all sorts of development tasks from "junior jobs" to more involved features.  Bugs or feature requests can be reported using the built-in wizard (Help->Bug Report Wizard).

Cooperation with other similar projects would be welcome, especially as some features could benefit everybody (based on a similar model as kipi plugins for KDE image applications).

The Kst Team
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