[Kst] Kst 2.0.5 released!

[Nicolas Brisset]

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Kst 2.0.5 released May 21st 2012

The Kst team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Kst 2.0.5, the latest feature and bugfix release of the outstanding open-source, cross-platform 2D plotting tool Kst. Kst is focused on performance and ease of use. Packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/kst/files/Kst%202.0.5/, 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 2.0.5 over the 2.0.4 version released in September 2011 are:
- Data-fixed annotation objects (e.g. text and arrows which scroll along with the curves)
- Support for Matlab's .mat file format for strigns, matrices, vectors and scalars
- Beta version of python scripting (on Linux only for now, depending on NumPy 1.6 and SciPy and requiring .py and .pyc files installed in the right place). See documentation at http://hen.astro.utoronto.ca/pyKst/ and don't hesitate to ask for help on the mailing list as this feature is still in beta stage
- Drag & Drop support: simply drop a .kst file onto Kst and it will open, if you drop any data file it will open in the data wizard
- Improved printing to vector formats (printer, PDF, SVG)
- Optional antialiasing (may be slow on some systems)
- A number of bugs and crashes fixed in various areas, like shared axis boxes. See detailed changelog at http://kst-plot.kde.org/files/Log_messages_2.0.4_to_2.0.5.txt for more information

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:
- improvements to the Python-based, numPy and sciPy compatible scripting and availability on other platforms than Linux
- 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

Bugs or feature requests can be reported as usual using the built-in wizard (Help->Bug Report Wizard).

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. Kst is an ideal project for university or college teachers and students who would want to get involved in an OSS project, if you are interested contact us!
Cooperation with other similar projects would also 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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