.. $Id: ReleaseNotes 1253 2009-12-09 12:06:08Z bverheg $    -*- rst -*-
  
..
  
  This file is part of pyFormex 0.8.1 Release Wed Dec  9 11:27:53 2009
  pyFormex is a tool for generating, manipulating and transforming 3D
  geometrical models by sequences of mathematical operations.
  Homepage: http://pyformex.org   (http://pyformex.berlios.de)
  Copyright (C) Benedict Verhegghe (benedict.verhegghe@ugent.be)
  Distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.
  
  
  This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
  (at your option) any later version.
  
  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.
  
  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
  
  


pyFormex 0.8.1  Releasenotes
============================

This is a collection of the most prominent changes in pyFormex 0.8
compared to the previous release 0.8


Documentation
-------------
The most notable change is the new documentation system, Sphinx, used
to create and manage the documentation. The old manual has been
removed from the distribution and the svn repositories, in favor of
the new docs. There will be a global cleanup and expansion of the docs
before the next release.
 

Installation
------------
The installation procedure will install the new (sphinx) docs in the
pyFormex install tree.


Command line
------------


Configuration
-------------


Core
----
- Coords: new transformations 'hyperCylindrical' and 'flare'
- class method 'fromstring' to read 'Coords' or 'Formex' from a string


Gui
---
- Uniform timeout for InputDialog, MessageBox, TextBox
- Added ReStructuredText format to MessageBox and TextBox
- Background color(s) can be set from the Viewport Menu
- The viewport menu has an item to set the Near and Far clipping planes 


Drawing
-------
- The imagearray module allows conversion between bitmap images and
  numpy arrays
- The imagecolor module allows bitmap images to be used as a color
  array
- The drawing routines for Formex and Mesh type geometry have been unified
- All geometry Actors now support picking of actors, elements, edges, points 
- The Canvas can have a background with a vertical color gradient.
- The current viewport is visualized by a colored frame
- The ColorScale has two new color palets, which provide much better
  coloring: RAINBOW and IRAINBOW. Thanks to Tomas Praet for signaling
  this. RAINBOW is now the default.
- Drawing 2D text has been reverted to the GLUT text fonts. Better
  font selection and alignment using gravity have been aded.
 

Scripting
---------


Plugins
-------
- fe_abq: The Abaqus .inp format exporter has many new features. 
- formian: The Formian compatibilitye functions have been removed from
  the core formex module and placed in a separate plugin.
- inertia: principal() allows sorting tha axes and forcing right hand
  side axes system
- jobs_menu: An illustrative plugin menu for sending computational jobs
  to a remote server and collect the results for postprocessing.
- surface: New method `curvature` to compute the surface curvature. 

Examples
--------
The data files for the examples have been moved to the pyformex/data directory.
The following new examples have been added:

- CircumCircle
- ColorImage
- ColorScale
- Flare
- Grid
- Helix
- Lustrum
- OpticalIllusions
- Sweep
- TestDraw
- TextGravity
- Widgets
- World

