Prerelease version 4.2.1-pre1

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

I have placed a tarball on SourceForge containing a trial version
of an incremental release 4.2.1.  This is a bug-fix release, including
fixes for installation problems reported on several platforms.
It also includes a couple of minor new features that were just a little
too late for the code freeze leading up to 4.2.0

Barring any problem reports, my plan is to bump the PATCHLEVEL up
to 4.2.1 proper and release it with no changes to the code.


   	          GNUPLOT VERSION 4.2.1-pre1
	    =======================================

This is trial release of version 4.2.1, which is itself an incremental
bug-fix release for version 4.2.0.  A synopsis of the changes since 4.2.0
is given below and in the NEWS file.  Full information is given in the
ChangeLog.   Unless people report problems with this pre-release, it will
be re-tagged as 4.2.1 and released with no other changes.

New features, changes and fixes since gnuplot version 4.2.0
===========================================================
* NEW allow extra column in 2D plots containing color information
* NEW set term latex {size XX,YY}
* FIX buffering of very long input lines
* FIX clipping of image data against plot boundary
* FIX polygon clipping bugs
* FIX key sample for plots with variable color
* FIX wxt initialization on non-gnu systems
* FIX escape sequence %% handling in sprintf() format strings
* FIX Apply "set style incr user" to 3D contours and to columnstacked histograms
* FIX Allow string variable as filename for "fit via <filename>"
* CHANGE defer x11 initialization
* CHANGE clean up configuration files for amg, cyg, mgw, dj2
* CHANGE modify SVG output to accommodate non-compliant viewers
* CHANGE allow 'strcol()' as shorthand for 'stringcolumn()'
* CHANGE default to "blacktext" for TeX-based PostScript variants


Demo plots illustrating these and other features are online at

	http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo_4.2/

You can download a source tarball for gnuplot version 4.2.1-pre1 from the 
gnuplot development site on SourceForge.

	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2055


Installation
------------
Installation instructions are available in the source itself; the short
version for linux/unix-like systems is to unpack the tarball and then
build it:
		cd gnuplot-4.2.1-pre1 ; ./configure ; make
test it:
		make check
install it:
		make install


Known issues
------------
- Plot styles image and rgbimage are marked EXPERIMENTAL; their implementation
  is incomplete and may change in future versions of gnuplot
- Internationalization and locale support is incomplete in this version.
  If you encounter problems with character encodings, numerical formats, or
  other locale issues, try the CVS version on SourceForge.

Support
-------
Please report all bugs and installation problems to the bug tracker
on SourceForge:

	http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=2055&atid=102055

There is also an active gnuplot discussion forum on usenet group

	comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot

Development
-----------
Gnuplot development is quite active. The development branch (4.3) on 
SourceForge contains preliminary implementations of many new features;
feedback and additional contributions of code are very welcome.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt