Closes PR #25450 submitted by me.
Ok'ed wiz@/snj@/root (at) garbled.net
Thanks to xtraeme@ for fixing GD's X11 issues.
From the CHANGELOG:
What's New
==========
The list of changes is immense this time, so only the highlights
can be given here. For the full details, see the NEWS file or the
ChangeLog, or look into the online version of the documentation at
http://www.gnuplot.info/docs/gnuplot.html#What_is_New_in_Version_4.0
You'll quite probably have to (re-)read large parts of the
documentation to learn all the details that have changed.
Major changes visible to users:
-------------------------------
o Global Command syntax change: instead of 'set no...' it's now
'unset ...'.
o Commands 'set data style', 'set function style' and 'set linestyle'
changed to 'set style {data|function|line}, respectively.
o Colour-coded plots in 3D and simulated 2D through the new 'pm3d'
plotting style.
o Boxes drawn by plotstyles 'boxes', 'candlesticks' and boxed errorbar
styles can be filled with solid colors or hatch patterns.
o New plot style 'with filledcurves' to fill an area defined by a curve
in solid colour.
o Windows, X11, OS/2 and GGI interactive graphical terminals now support
interaction with the plot window by mouse and hotkeys.
o The "enhanced" mode has been generalized from PostScript to some
other terminal drivers.
o 'set hidden3d' mode accepts non-grid data and hides them behind gridded
surfaces plotted with them.
o Several new terminal drivers: EMF, PDF, SVG, GGI, epslatex, aqua.
o New function to query if a user-defined variable exists.
o PNG and JPEG terminals using the GD library support libfreetype to
use true-type fonts.
o 'set label' can output a point symbol the comment refers to, and the
text itself can be rotated by arbitrary angles (on some terminals).
o The color of text elements can be changed.
o 'set size ratio' now affects 3D plots, too.
o The 'dgrid3d' can be switched between thin-plate splines and
the older weighted averaging method, at compile time.
o Some terminals now support 'koi8-r', ISO-Latin-2 and CP-852
encoding of user input.
o Windows gnuplot recognizes the Unix/X11 style '-persist' option,
and supports changing linewidth by core gnuplot commands.
o A native compilation option of gnuplot for Mac OS X is now part of
the mainline source, using the 'aquaterm' driver [3].
o Datafile comment character, column separator and decimal sign
can be changed.
o Arrows can be drawn with relative coordinates for the head, and the
heads can be filled.
o Allows 'set timefmt' independantly for each axis, and supports new
'%s' format for seconds-since-1970 input.
o Even more documentation misprints have been fixed, thanks to
Shigeharu TAKENO
Internal changes:
-----------------
o Reorganization of the entire source tree.
o Broken into considerably more source files than before.
o Large sets of related global variables have been collected into
relatively few global data structures (the 'axis' array and a
global 'key' data structure, e.g.).
o The gnuplot_x11 driver no longer is installed in the PATH, to
avoid confusion about it.
o Scaling and ticking of time/date axes respects the fact that
12 and 60 are not the same 10 or 100 much better.
And, obviously, more bug fixes than could possibly fit into this
narrow margin...
Changes:
3.7.3
* Major: contributed code to re-add gamma, inverse normal, and
inverse error function
* Windows specific fixes, most visibly changing the 'pause' command
to avoid cpu hogging, and updated build procedures
* Improved metapost driver
* Make Linux driver work with devfs
* Numerous bugfixes backported from development version, see ChangeLog
* A large number of documentation misprints have been fixed
3.7.2
* Major: we have removed code that was labeled with a
non-commercial use clause. The effect is that this
removes the gamma, inverse normal, and inverse error
function from platforms that have no native
implementation.
* Support for BeOS
* New terminal drivers: emf (Enhanced Metafile Format),
epslatex, ggi (General Graphics Interface), pdf, svg
(W3C Scalable Vector Graphics)
* Updated png driver: web-friendly palette, transparent
images, explicit colour specification
* Updated HPGL driver: optional multi-pen support,
alternative plot sizes, variable font sizes
* Updated gnugraph driver: now requires GNU plotutils 2.2
or better
* Updated eepic driver: picture environment now scales with
"set size"
* Updated fig driver to fig file format 3.2
* Updated tkcanvas driver
* Fix font size option in pslatex driver
* configure-alike script for VMS
* Command substitution in double-quoted strings
* Vector clipping style for 2D plots
* Sort terminals by name before displaying
* Numerous bugfixes
