TOPCAT release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear topcat-users,

this is to announce a new release of TOPCAT and friends:

   TOPCAT v4.6-3
   STILTS v3.1-6
   STIL   v3.3-3

There are quite a lot of different new features, enhancements and fixes
included this time.  A few highlights:

  - Improvements to interactive shape selection: now works in Sky
    as well as Plane plots, and has now shape types Box, Ellipse
    and Circle alongside Polygon, Below etc.  On completion the
    shape expression is displayed in ADQL as well as topcat's
    expression language.

  - Adaptive colour map scaling: new Scaling options histogram and 
    histolog alongside the existing options linear, log etc 
    can now scale the colour map from the data in a smarter way
    than just setting the min/max range, which can make structure much
    easier to see.  This should have been available a long time ago.

  - Options to plot quadrilaterals and other polygons.

  - I/O support for the semi-standard HEALPix-FITS format and 
    for (draft) VOTable 1.4.

Note a couple of these items constitute a kind of half-hearted
support for regions; I'm hoping to provide some better region
handling capabilities in a future release.

Downloads can be found at the usual places:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/

including detailed change logs:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html

Thanks!  Any feedback to me or the topcat-user list welcome as always.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/