Folks,

We are happy to announce matplotlib v2.0.0rc2 !

Please re-distribute this widely.

This is the final planned release candidate for the long awaited mpl v2.0 release.  

For the full details of what is new please see http://matplotlib.org/2.0.0rc2/users/whats_new.html 

Some of the highlights:

 - new default style (see http://matplotlib.org/2.0.0rc2/users/dflt_style_changes.html )

 - new default color map (viridis)

 - default font includes most western alphabets

 - performance improvements in text and image rendering

 - many bug fixes and documentation improvements

 - many new rcparams

Please help us by testing the release candidate!  We would like to hear about any uses where the new defaults are significantly worse, any changes we failed to documents, or (as always) any bugs and regressions.  

To make this easy we have both wheels and conda packages for mac, linux and windows.  You can install pre-releases via pip:

   pip install --pre matplotlib

or via conda:

   conda update --all -c conda-forge

   conda install -c conda-forge/label/rc -c conda-forge matplotlib

For more details see http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html .

Please report any issues to https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues or matplotlib-users at python.org .

The target for v2.0 final is early Jan 2017. 

This release is the work of over 200 individual code contributors and many

more who took part in the discussions, tested the pre-releases, and

reported bug reports.

Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Tom