ANN: matplotlib-0.70

[John Hunter]

matplotlib is a 2D graphics package that produces plots from python
scripts, the python shell, or embeds them in your favorite python GUI
-- wx, gtk, tk, fltk currently supported with qt in the works.  Unlike
many python plotting alternatives is written in python, so it is
easy to extend.  matplotlib is used in the finance industry, web
application servers, and many scientific and enginneering disciplines.
With a large community of users and developers, matplotlib is
approaching the goal of having a full featured, high quality, 2D
plotting library for python.

A lot of development has gone into matplotlib since the last major
release, which I'll summarize here.  For details, see the notes for
the incremental releases at http://matplotlib.sf.net/whats_new.html.

Major changes since matplotlib-0.60

 - The alpha version of the users guide -
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/users_guide.pdf.  There are still a number
   of sections to be completed, but it's a start!

 - The matlab namespace renamed pylab - if you are upgrading from a
   version older than 0.64, please remove site-packages/matplotlib
   before upgrading.  See
   http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matlab_to_pylab.py 

 - New plot types: contour plots (contour), polar charts (polar),
   horizontal bar charts (barh), pie charts (pie), sparse matrix
   visualization (spy and spy2).  Eg,
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#polar_demo

 - Full ipython http://ipython.scipy.org integration in the "pylab"
   mode for interactive control of matplotlib plots from the python
   shell.

 - A significantly improved interactive toolbar for panning, zooming,
   zoom to rect - see
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/tutorial.html#toolbar2. 

 - New backends: FLTK, Cairo, GTKCairo

 - Text - rotated mathtext, mathtext for postscript, text bounding
   boxes

 - Colormaps - 14 colormaps built-in
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#pcolor_demo

 - Images - performance optimizations for 4x faster large image
   handling, PIL support, interpolation and colorbar improvements,
   imread

 - Event handling for capturing mouse clicks, movements, keypresses,
   etc. - same pylab interface works across GUIs.  See
   examples/keypress_demo.py, examples/picker_demo.py,
   examples/coords_demo.py

 - set and get matlab style property introspection -
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples/set_and_get.py

 - improved dates handling for dates and date string formatting from
   0000-9999, eg
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/screenshots.html#finance_work

 - Be sure to check out the 120 examples at
   http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples


  Home page   : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net
  Downloads   : http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib 
  Screenshots : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
  Tutorial    : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html
  Credits     : http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/credits.html

John Hunter