C.2 Version History

Releases to date have been as follows:

Version 0.3b (4 June 2003)
First public release
Version 0.4b (8 July 2003)
Version 0.4-1b (10 July 2003)
Version 0.5b (20 October 2003)
Version 0.5-1 (18 November 2003)
Version 1.1-0 (21 April 2004)
Version 1.1-3 (5 May 2004)
Version 1.3 (20 October 2004)
This version has introduced many improvements in scalability, efficiency and functionality. TOPCAT is now quite happy with tables of a million rows or more (and hundreds of columns) even on systems with quite modest memory/CPU resources. The main improvements are as follows:
Plotting
  • Plotting is much faster and can handle many more points
  • Subsets can be selected from plot window by tracing out a non-rectangular region
  • You have more choice over plotting symbols (including semi-transparent ones)
  • Finally X or Y axes can be flipped!
  • Export to encapsulated PostScript is of improved quality (though for many points file sizes can get large)
  • Export to GIF format is available
  • Regression lines can be plotted and coefficients displayed (experimental capability - could be improved)
Table Formats
  • "-disk" flag allows use of disk backing storage for large tables
  • New 'FITS-plus' format stores rich table/column metadata in a FITS file
  • VOTable handler now fully VOTable 1.1 and 1.0 compatible
  • VOTable parsing now works with Java 5.0 platform
  • Comma-Separated Value format now supported for input and output
  • ASCII input handler rewritten to cope with much larger tables
  • ASCII handler now understands d/D as exponent letter as well as e/E
  • ASCII handler now uses Short/Float not Integer/Double where appropriate to save memory
  • ASCII format fixed bug for -0 degrees/hours in sexagesimal angles
  • Null handling improved for FITS & VOTable formats
  • FITS files store column descriptions in TCOMMx headers
  • Better error messages for unparsable tables
Table Joins
  • Various efficiency improvements and reductions in memory requirements
  • In cases of multiple possible matches, the closest is now chosen rather than picking one at random
  • Pair match now adds column containing score for each match (distance between points)
  • Units can be selected RA/Dec columns and match errors (so it doesn't need to be all in radians)
  • New match types suitable for multivariate matching (anistropic Cartesian, Sky+X, Sky+XY)
Data/Metadata Manipulation
  • Can add/remove table parameters
  • One-step column replacement dialogue from data or column windows
  • Synthetic column expressions now written out to column descriptions
GUI Navigation and Display
  • Improved rendering of numbers in tables (esp. Floats)
  • Better detection of displayed table column widths
  • New Control Window option on File menus
  • Better window resizing for some dialogue boxes
  • Less confusing error messages in many places
Algebraic Expressions
  • All available functions are now fully documented in help document and interactive Method Window
  • Many new trig, coordinate, type conversion, string manipulation functions
  • Big performance improvements for null values
Activation Actions
  • Clicking a point in the plot highlights the corresponding row in the data window and vice versa
  • Row selection can trigger display sky cutout region display
  • Row selection can trigger user-defined actions on activation

In addition, the following incompatibilities and changes have been introduced since the last version:

Version 1.3-1 (10 November 2004)
Minor changes:
Version 1.3-2 (6 Dec 2004)
Bug fix:
Version 1.4 (4 Feb 2005)
Load Dialogues
The graphical table load dialogue has been overhauled, and now has two main new features. First, it has been rewritten so that the GUI does not freeze during a long load; it is still currently not possible to interact with other TOPCAT windows while a load is taking place, but you can now cancel a load that is in progress.

Secondly, the provision of load dialogues has been modularised, and a number of new dialogues provided. The new ones are:

  • Cone Search
  • MySpace Browser
  • Registry Query
  • SIAP Query
If the required classes are present, you can acquire tables from these external sources as well as the traditional methods of loading from disk etc. New command line flags corresponding to each of these have been added to ensure that they are present and make them prominent in the load dialogue. Furthermore it is possible to plug in additional load dialogues at runtime using the startable.load.dialogs system property.

The appearance of the Load Window has changed; now only the File Browser button is visible along with the Location field in the body of the window, but the DataSources menu can be used to display other available table import dialogues.

Packaging
The program can now be obtained in two standalone forms: topcat-full.jar and topcat-lite.jar. The former is much larger than before (11 Mbyte), since it contains a number of classes to support custom load dialogues such as the MySpace browser and web service interaction, as well as the SoG classes. The latter contains only the classes for the core functionality, and is much smaller (3 Mbyte).
Explode Array Column action
There is now a new button in the Columns Window which replaces an array-valued column with a scalar column for each of its elements.
Paste'n'Load
You can now load a table by pasting its filename or URL as text into the table list in the Control Window (using the X selection on X-windows - not sure if or how this works on other platforms).
Help message
The result of topcat -help is now more comprehensive, describing briefly what each option does and listing system properties as well as arguments/flags proper.
Version 1.4-1 (8 February 2005)
Version 1.5 (17 March 2005)
File Access
Load dialogues have changed again somewhat, and save dialogues as well. The default file browser in both cases is now a Filestore Browser, which is very much like the standard file browser, but can browse files in remote filesystems as well; currently supported are files in AstroGrid's MySpace or on an SRB (Storage Resource Broker) server. You can now save files to these remote locations as well as load from them.

In addition, the save dialogue now displays the current row subset and sort order - this makes it easier to see and/or change the details of the table you're about to save.

BugFixes
A few more minor changes have been made.
  • Error display dialogue boxes have been improved in some places
  • Various bugs relating to JDBC database access have been fixed
  • Some minor issues relating to VOTables with single-character columns have been addressed
Version 1.6 (30 June 2005)
Activation Actions
Some more activation functionality has been added:
  • New View URL as Web Page option introduced in Activation Window
  • New System class of activation functions containing exec functions which execute commands on the local operating system
  • New Browsers class of activation functions for displaying URLs in web browsers (external or basic fallback one)
Algebraic Functions
New Times class added containing functions for converting between Modified Julian Day and ISO 8601 format epochs.
Sky Matching
The default sky matching algorithm now uses HEALPix rather than HTM for assigning sky pixels to RA,Dec positions. This gives much faster sky matches in most cases, and uses somewhat less memory so can be used on larger tables. It has also fixed a bug which missed out some possible matches. HTM-based matching is currently still provided as an option, but this is mainly for debugging purposes and may be withdrawn in the future.
Logging
The message logging has been tidied up. The main observable consequence of this is that fewer untidy messages are written to the console when TOPCAT is run from a standalone jar file rather than a full starjava installation. By specifying the new -verbose (or -v) flag one or more times you can get those messages back. The messages (in fact all logging messages at any level) can also be viewed from the GUI by using the new File|Show Log menu option from the Control Window.
SOAP Services
TOPCAT now acts as a SOAP server; SOAP requests can now be made to a running instance of TOPCAT to get it to display tables by location or by sending XML for a VOTable direct. Because of limitations in Axis, this latter method won't work for arbitrarily large tables.
Documentation changes
The tablecopy tool is no longer covered in this document; it is replaced by the tcopy tool in the separate STILTS package. There has also been some reorganisation of this document, mainly in the appendices.
Minor changes
  • Added -version flag
  • Added (dummy) Print option to Data Window. This just presents a message to the effect that you should save to a printable format.
  • Fixed a bug which gave errors when expressions contained a NULL_ test on the first column of a table.
  • Modified one of the demo tables to contain a column with URLs in it.
Version 1.6-1 (7 July 2005)
Bugfixes:
Version 1.7 (30 September 2005)
Crossmatching
There have been major improvements in the flexibility, and minor improvements to performance, of two-table crossmatching.
  • New match algorithm Sky with Errors introduced. This allows you to specify a column giving the maximum permissible match error (so it can vary per row) rather than a fixed value for the whole table.
  • In the case of multiple possible matches between the two tables, instead of automatically giving you only the closest match, you can now select whether you'd like only the closest one or all those which fit your criteria.
  • You can now specify which rows you want to see in the output: 1 and 2, 1 or 2, All from 1, All from 2, 1 not 2, 2 not 1, 1 xor 2. This is pretty much all the possibilities which make sense, and in particular allows you to do 'left outer joins' (1 not 2).
  • The match score column which results from most matches now comes (a) in sensible units where possible (e.g. arcseconds not radians) and (b) with metadata which tells you what its meaning and units are.
  • More information is available in added columns after the match; as well as the match score, information about matched groups is inserted where appropriate.
  • The "Spherical Polar" match algorithm is now rebadged as the hopefully less confusing "Sky 3d".
Similar changes for 1-table and multi-table matches should follow in future versions.
MySpace Access
MySpace I/O has been re-implemented to use the ACR rather than the (now deprecated) CDK classes it was using before. As well as probably being more reliable and less likely to break with future changes in MySpace server protocols, this gives the benefit of single sign on. The effect of this is that you will need to have the AstroGrid desktop running on your machine before you can access MySpace from TOPCAT.
Algebraic functions
  • Added Julian Epoch and Besselian Epoch conversion functions to Times class.
  • Added RANDOM special function.
Miscellaneous
  • When you select a column in the Columns window, it now scrolls the table in the Data Window so that the selected column is visible. This is a boon when dealing with tables that have very many columns.
  • String "null" interpreted as a blank value in ASCII tables.
  • Added new activation action to launch system default browser.
Bugfixes
  • Fixed some relatively harmless bugs to do with actions available when you select the dummy "Index" column. You can now unsort from a popup menu in the table viewer window.
  • Believed to work fine with Java 1.5 now (there were previously some issues with MySpace at Java 1.5).
  • Fixed bug in ASCII input handler which misidentified blank lines, or DOS-format line ends, as end of file.
Version 1.7-1 (4 October 2005)
Bugfixes:
Version 1.8 (13 October 2005)
Version 2.0 (3 February 2006)
A major upgrade of TOPCAT's visualisation capabilities has taken place in this release. There are considerable improvements in functionality, flexibility and efficiency over previous versions:
New graphics windows
In addition to the 2-d scatter plot from previous versions, the following visualisation windows are now available: The new 3-d functionality does not require you to install Java3D or any other third-party 3D toolkit to work (nor does it take advantage of any such toolkit which may be present).
Multi-dataset/multi-table plotting
The plot windows are no longer associated with a single table. All of them allow you to display data from different tables, or from different tuples of columns of the same table, on the same plot. You can layer as many plots as you like on the same axes, using different plotting styles for the different datasets. As before, you can still display data from different subsets of the same table and same columns using different styles.
Plotting Styles
All the graphics windows allow you to set the plotting style for each data set individually, using a wide range of options including colour, line width, marker size, (histogram) bar style, etc. This allows you considerable control over the visual details of the plots.
Transparent markers
All the 2-d and 3-d scatter plots allow you to render points using markers of variable transparency. In a crowded plot, this allows you to see much more information than using opaque points, since you can get some idea of how many points (of different data sets) have been drawn at a given point on the plotting surface.
Line drawing & linear correlation
The 2-d scatter plot can now optionally plot lines associated with data sets. It can either draw straight line segments joining all the plotted points in a set, or draw per-dataset linear correlation lines. In the latter case it will report line gradient, intercept and correlation coefficient.
Improved column selection
The selector boxes for selecting which columns to plot are now 'editable' - that is, instead of selecting the column from a drop down list it is now also possible to type an expression into them instead. This may be more convenient if there is a very long list of columns. It also means that you can use an algebraic expression based on the names of one or more columns instead of a simple column name. The selectors also have small arrow boxes next to them which makes it easy to cycle through the list of known columns. These features are also available at some other places in the program where a column value is required.
Manual axis configuration
As well as zooming in and out using the mouse, you can now set the axis limits by typing them into an axis dialogue box. You can also set the text which will form the axis annotation on the plot.
Status line
Most plots now feature a panel at the bottom of the window indicating how many points have been plotted and the current position of the mouse pointer (if any) on the plotting surface.
Performance
Scatter plots of large datasets now use considerably less memory and around an order of magnitude less CPU time than previously (a 2-d million point replot now takes about 1 second - plotting it the first time may be rather longer since it needs to acquire the data which may be I/O intensive).

Some non graphics-related improvements have also been made as follows:

Version 2.1 (7 April 2006)
A number of graphical and other improvements have been made at this release.
Stacked Line Plot
A new Stacked Line Plot visualisation window has been added. This is especially suitable for use with time series data.
Asynchronous data reading in graphics windows
All the graphics windows now read data for plotting asynchronously. What this means is that when you change the plot in a way which requires the data to be read or re-read then the GUI will not lock up and you can do other things, including changing the plot in other ways before it has completed drawing. A progress bar at the bottom of the window indicates progress. This is only noticeable for large (slow to read) files.
Axis Zooming
The existing Histogram, 2-D Scatter Plot and Density Map windows, as well as the new Stacked Line Plot, now allow you to do a 1-d zoom by dragging the mouse near the axis, as well as the 2-d zoom by dragging on the plot surface.
PLASTIC Tool Interoperability
TOPCAT now sends and services messages using the PLatform for AStronomical Tool InterConnection protocol. See Section 8.
IPAC Data Format
Data files in the IPAC format defined by the CalTech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center can now be read. This is how data from the Spitzer satellite amongst others is normally provided.
String-typed coordinate columns
If suitably identified (e.g. by UCD or units), string-valued columns which represent data in certain well-known forms, currently sexagesimal angles and ISO-8601-format dates, can now be treated directly as numeric values in column selector boxes such as the ones in the plotting windows, rather than having to define a new column using a string->numeric converter.
Memory Error Reporting
When the JVM runs out of memory, it now attempts to post a popup window explaining this rather than just writing a terse message to the console. This popup also gives you the opportunity to view a new section added to the documentation: Tips for Large Tables.
SOAP Service deprecated
TOPCAT no longer by default runs a SOAP server for accepting tables. You can choose to run it by specifying the -soap flag on the command line. This facility may be withdrawn in future versions, in view of the fact that the PLASTIC service can provide similar functionality.
Logo fade
The Starlink logo at the top of every window is set to fade out gradually over the period 1-APR-2006 to 1-SEP-2006.
Bug fixes and minor alterations
  • Export of GIF and Encapsulated PostScript images from the graphics windows has been improved - unwanted grey backgrounds round the edges are now rendered transparent in GIFs and white in EPS. A section on Exporting Graphics has also been added to the manual.
  • A number of graphical anomalies such as the plot bounds being reset when an axis Flip button was toggled have been ironed out.
  • The JDBC behaviour has been improved: some bugs have been fixed and it now no longer asks for an SQL username/password twice.
  • Work around intermittent bug when loading small files from MySpace.
  • Density maps are now exported into FITS format with better WCS headers where appropriate.
  • The SDSS JPEG cutout activation action URL has been updated from DR2 to DR4.
  • A bug which caused the first row in a table to be included erroneously in graphical subset selections has been fixed.
  • Added an offset selector toggle button to the Histogram window.
Version 2.1-1 (13 April 2006)
Sphere Zoom
You can now zoom in the Spherical Plot.
PLASTIC
There are some improvements to the PLASTIC functionality and documentation.
  • In addition to Broadcast actions for the various PLASTIC messages transmission types, there are now corresponding Send actions which allow you to direct the message to only a single selected listener application. These actions are now enabled/disabled according to whether any suitable PLASTIC listeners are registered.
  • You can now pop up a little window from the Control Window's Interop menu which displays the currently registered PLASTIC listeners. The functionality of this window may be extended in future releases.
  • When TOPCAT receives a showObjects message, it now checks if a matching subset exists rather than always creating and adding a new one. If it does, it just sets current the existing one. This can cut down (a bit) on proliferation of Row Subsets.
  • The PLASTIC section of the manual has been improved.
  • Some of the screenshots have been updated to include PLASTIC-related features.
  • URLs using the file: scheme sent by TOPCAT in PLASTIC messages now correctly conform to RFC 1738.
MySpace
A workaround has been introduced for MySpace browsing performance problems. Run with -Dmyspace.cache=true to speed it up at the expense of accuracy.
Version 2.1-2 (21 April 2006)
This is mainly a bug fix release.
Version 2.1-3 (11 May 2006)
Bug fixes and some minor enhancements.
Version 2.2 (7 July 2006)
Column-oriented storage
New features for permitting column-oriented storage (colfits format, startable.storage policy "sideways") have been introduced. These can provide considerable efficiency improvements for certain tasks when working with very large (and especially wide) tables.
Bug fixes
  • Fixed bug which caused some points to be missed out in spherical plots.
  • ISO-8601 strings now permit times of 24:00:00 as they should.
  • Quoted unit values are examined to determine probable column data types.
Other items
  • Added flux conversion functions (Jansky<->magnitude).
Version 2.2-1 (3 August 2006)
Version 2.3 (5 October 2006)
Various modifications and improvements: Bug fixes:
Version 2.3-1 (Starlink Hokulei release)

Graphics upgrades

Version 3.0 (5 July 2007)
This release includes major visualisation improvements and some changes to the plotting user interface:
Error bars
Comprehensive plotting of symmetric and asymmetric error bars (and crosshairs, and boxes, and ellipses, ...) in 1, 2 and 3 dimensional plots is now provided -- see Appendix A.4.1.3.
Auxiliary (colour) axes
It is now possible to modify the colour of plotted points according to values in one or more axes additional to the spatial ones -- see Appendix A.4.1.5.
Histogram Weighting
The Histogram and Density Map windows now have the option of weighting the quantity represented, so that the binned values are sums rather than just counts.
Density Map Colour Scale
When the density map is in indexed (non-RGB) mode you can now select from various colour maps to represent bin occupancy. This makes level differences easier to see.
Plot window rearrangement
Buttons which affect data selection are now arranged in their own toolbar below the plot (Appendix A.4.1.1). The size of the plot control area can be manually resized to give more room for the plot itself by using the Split Window () button, which is useful on small screens.
Expression language enhancements
Table parameters can now be referenced in expressions using param$ notation (Section 6.3), and both columns and parameters can be referenced by UCD using ucd$ notation (Section 6.1).
Statistics & Histogram result re-use
The Statistics and Histogram windows now both provide Save and Import actions, which take the data presented in the window and allow it to be saved to a file or imported directly into TOPCAT as a new table.
Cartesian 3D zoom
It is now possible to zoom the 3D Plot towards the centre in the same way as the Spherical Plot.
GAVO Millennium simulation database load dialogue
You can now directly query the GAVO Millennium database service (Appendix A.5.5). Thanks to Gerard Lemson of GAVO for contributing code for this.
Row subset improvements
Row Subset names can now be re-used, and when you are asked to select a new subset name you are allowed to choose one from the list of existing ones. When a row selection is received from another application via PLASTIC the subset name (the name of the sending application) is re-used in this way. This helps to keep the number of subsets under control.

Receving a row subset from PLASTIC in this way, and certain other actions, now cause the subset to be shown straight away (and updated if necessary) on any existing plots, which makes this kind of PLASTIC interaction more responsive.

The size of each subset, and also the corresponding percentage of the table it represents, is now calculated automatically and displayed in the Subset Window. The old behaviour of only calculating sizes on request can be reinstated using the Autocount rows () menu item if required.

Fix Vertical in 3D plots
A Stay Upright () button is provided in the Cartesian and spherical 3D plots which allow you to keep the Z axis/north pole vertical during rotations.
Quantile calculation
The Statistics Window can now calculate quantiles (median, quartiles, .001, .01, .99 and .999) on request.
Minor changes and bugfixes
  • JPEG and PNG now plot export available from all graphics windows.
  • Dramatic performance improvement for transparent pixel plotting in 3D plots on some platforms.
  • Added locale-specific formatDecimalLocal() functions in class Formats.
  • Added fluxToLuminosity and luminosityToFlux functions in class Fluxes.
  • Improved deduplication of column names when joining tables.
  • 3D plots now correctly report number of visible points.
  • Improved error message for broken CSV files.
  • Improved error reporting in the presence of a deficient JVM (such as GNU gcj).
  • Worked around a Mac OSX Java bug which caused table display to go funny when columns were deleted.
  • Fixed error in output of FITS table TNULLn header cards - write them as numeric not string values.
  • Fixed a number of bugs in responding to PLASTIC messages (threading, failure to respond).
  • 3D plots now plot symbols for all subsets not just one, as for 2D plots.
  • Fixed bug which prevented non-string parameter values from being reassigned.
Version 3.0-1 (Starlink Puana release)
Version 3.1 (29 August 2007)
Version 3.2 (28 January 2008)
Functionality enhancements
  • Considerably improved display of per-table metadata in the Parameter Window. It is now possible to view long or multi-line parameter values.
  • FITS header cards in table HDU are now read (but not written) as table parameters.
  • Add mouse wheel zoom for 3D plots.
  • Add Write Mode selector to SQL Output Dialogue, to allow appending and optional drop prior to create of new table in database.
  • Now TOPCAT will automatically register with a PLASTIC hub any time one becomes available - the hub does not have to be running when TOPCAT starts. As a corrollary, if you start an internal or external hub from the Interop menu, you no longer need to explicitly invoke the Register item afterwards.
  • Add -exthub flag which starts a new external PLASTIC hub.
  • Activation window permits selection of different image viewers for View URL as Image option. Note this is not currently provided for the Display Cutout Image option - this may be addressed in the future.
Bugfixes and minor improvements
  • Added -stilts convenience flag so you can easily run STILTS from a TOPCAT installation.
  • Fix calculation error in fluxToLuminosity function.
  • Fix some bugs associated with text label plotting.
  • Error bars for zero/negative values are now correctly extended to the axis (rather than being omitted) in 2D plots with logarithmic axes.
  • Modified the size of some windows - now posts somewhat smaller windows if a small screen is in use.
  • System properties specified explicitly on command line now take precendence over those in .starjava.properties file.
  • Embedded spaces in output ASCII format table column names are now substituted with underscores, which prevents writing ASCII tables that cannot be read.
  • Downgraded from WARNING to INFO log messages about the (extremely common) VOTable syntax error of omitting a FIELD/PARAM element's datatype attribute.
  • Starting an external hub now works more reliably.
Version 3.3 (19 August 2008)
Functionality enhancements:
  • Added normalisation option () to Histogram Window.
  • In overplots using different tables, an attempt is now made to use the same columns/expressions for axis values as for the main table. This may be convenient when overplotting data from several similar tables.
  • FITS files with columns using variable-length arrays ('P' or 'Q' data type descriptors) can now be read (in random access mode, i.e. from an uncompressed FITS file on disk, only).
  • The lut.files system property can now be used to configure custom colour maps for auxiliary axes and density maps - see Section 9.2.3.
  • New class Arrays added to algebraic functions.
  • Histogram Offset control now works for logarithmic X scale as well as linear.
Bug fixes and other changes:
  • Efficiency improvements (~25%? in both CPU time and memory usage) for HEALPix-based sky crossmatching. Thanks to Nikolay Kouropatkine at Fermilab for a new version of the PixTools library which provided this improvement (this version also fixed a - minor? - HEALPix bug).
  • Sexagesimal field identification for ASCII input files has become more forgiving; it now accepts minutes or seconds equal to 60 without a syntax error.
  • Fixed a pair matching performance bug (slower if tables were not given in the right order) introduced at v1.4.
  • The -disk flag is now honoured when loading tables from JDBC, which makes it possible to input larger datasets from RDBMS.
  • Fixed problem which caused the graphics system to hang or fail when drawing Dot-to-dot lines in 2D plot for points a very long way off the screen.
  • Fixed bug which caused incorrect plotting of cumulative histograms with small weights.
  • Slight modification to spike-style bar drawing in Histogram, now has tidier appearance when using dashed lines.
Internal
There has been extensive internal reorgamisation of the plotting classes. There should be no user-visible effects of this, but please report anything which seems to be misbehaving.
Version 3.4 (23 December 2008)
SAMP
TOPCAT now uses SAMP as a (preferred) alternative to PLASTIC for inter-tool interoperability. SAMP is now usually the default; the old behaviour can be recovered using the -plastic command-line flag. Although much of the messaging behaviour remains the same, various improvements to the GUI accompany this change:
  • New SAMP Panel at the bottom of the Control Window summarising status
  • New SAMP Status () toolbar button in Control Window, which pops up new SAMP Window
  • Other slight rerrangements of toolbar buttons and menu items in Control Window
  • Broadcast Row checkbox added near Activation Action in Control Window
For more discussion see Section 8.
Registry Access
TOPCAT's registry access has finally been updated to use VOResource 1.03 and the Registry Interface 1.01 (it was previously using very out of date protocols). This means that the Cone Search dialogue (as well as the semi-supported SIAP and Registry dialogues) will now pick up a much more up to date set of services. Additionally, you can choose your own registry service, and the registry searches in those dialogues now feature keyword searches rather than picking up all known cone/SIAP services. See Appendix A.5.4.
Other enhancements
  • Table columns and parameters can now be referenced by Utype using utype$ syntax in a similar way to using UCDs - see Section 6.1.
  • When a new subset is created by whatever method, the user can now elect to transmit it to other applications using SAMP/PLASTIC as an alternative to adding a new subset to the table's subset list.
  • Add items to Help menu for viewing help in the default web browser rather than TOPCAT's help browser.
  • Add a plot output format option to write gzipped PostScript.
  • -version command line flag now reports subversion revision as well as symbolic version number.
Bugfixes
  • Fixed histogram bug (blank plot) for small values when using logarithmic Y axis.
  • Fix stacktrace error in 3D plots when no data is available.
  • The SIMBAD name resolver is fixed in the cone search window (it was using a no-longer-supported service format).