There's a major new version of GNU Octave with support for HiDPI, new print options, and a range of new functions.

GNU Octave is popular as a free open source alternative to MATLAB that makes doing difficult math easy. It supports matrix operations, provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and has extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation.

The first change of note to the new version is the HiDPI support for plotting, meaning it looks better on high resolution screens, i.e. those with greater than 96 DPI.

The new version, Octave 5.1, adds a number of new functions. There's a new core function that applies a function to a sliding window of arbitrary size on a dataset and accumulate the results. The fsolve function has been tweaked to use larger step sizes leading to faster convergence, and the ranks function is now 25 times faster having been recoded for performance. The randi function has also been recoded to produce an unbiased sample of integers. Other functions that have been improved are isdefinite, intmax, intmin and flintmax.

Other improvements include new print options for PDF and PostScript, and a default to use an OpenGL-based method for printing to raster formats. 

A number of changes have been made to make Octave more compatible with MATLAB. Some central functions have been changed so that the dimensions, size and shape of an object are now fully defined by the size function. The issymmetric and ishermitian functions now accept an option to calculate the symmetric or skew-symmetric property of a matrix. Issorted now uses ascend or descend rather than ascending or descending. Other functions changed to be MATLAB compatible include strncmp, strncmpi, str2func, and clear. In the area of nonlinear equations, several default solver options have been changed to be Matlab compatible.

Elsewhere, FFT calculations now use the FFTW library, and the OSMesa library is no longer used for offscreen rendering. 

More Information

Octave Release Notes

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