Winplot for Windows 95/98/ME/2K/XP (558K) (31 Dec 2005)
31 Dec: The Misc|Simulprint feature (printing more than one Winplot diagram on a single sheet of paper) was crashing frequently. I think I have fixed the problem. We’ll see.
30 Dec: Enabled a feature that many you have been hoping for. Shading explicit 2-dim inequalities can now be done with solid color. The dotted fill has never behaved predictably when pasting diagrams into Word documents, so this should be an improvement. This was a little complicated, so there might be bugs.
28 Dec: Opening a second file by double-clicking was still not working, but should be now.
25 Dec: In response to users reporting difficulty opening winplot files by double-clicking file icons, a new version has been prepared that attempts to deal with new file-naming conventions (which allow spaces and extra periods). See the FAQ.
21 Dec: The 2-dim Slider and 3-dim Slicer dialogs were not responding correctly to changes in scrollbar settings. Now they are.
28 Sept: The Mapping windows now allow the composition of mappings in the Two|Combinations dialog.
8 Sept: A user pointed out a bug in my parser, which shows itself when you divide one expression by a constant trigonometric expression, as in “cos(x)/cos(0.5)”. It is now fixed, I think.
16 Aug: A teacher suggested some improvements to the secant-tangent demos. You can also now put arrows at the ends of segments in 3-dim drawings.
14 Aug: A user pointed out that double-clicking an inventory item ought to open the edit dialog. Now it does.
6 Aug: At the request of several users, the 2-dim program will now find the intersection of two implicitly defined curves. Please report any glitches — this was more complicated to program than you might think.
12 Jul: At the request of several users, you can now put arrows at the ends of segments in 2-dim drawings.
29 May: The format of tables (column width and decimal places) can now be controlled by the user.
6 May: Oops! Yesterday’s updates were incorrectly compiled, causing some menu items to be grayed out. Sorry for the inconvenience, but please download again.
5 May: The increased resolution feature installed on 10 March can now be disabled by those users who would rather not have the added file size. In addition, it is now possible to assign a filename to the graphical display, using the Windows enhanced metafile format. In 3D, many users were being mystified by the strange effects caused by not specifying a bounding box for sequences and differential equations, since the default examples install rather large boxes. The program now prompts the user for box information when the example is first created, just as it does for implicit examples.
24 Apr: It was possible for z-axis Tours in 3-dim windows to cause a loss of system resources. A repair has been made.
2 Apr: In the user-defined function dialog, the horizontal scroll bar was not appearing when it was supposed to. Now it is.
23 Mar: Sérgio de Albuquerque Souza sent me this remarkable link. It shows how parametric equations allow a creative Winplot user to escape the confines of functions defined on rectangular domains.
10 Mar: A long-overdue improvement, which should please those users who paste Winplot diagrams into MS Word documents. These embedded figures have been printing for years at screen resolution (which means very low resolution), but — thanks to a suggestion from an user — they should now print with maximum resolution. Also fixed two bugs: One caused a crash when polar-coordinate points were highlighted with arcs. Another bug caused sporadic crashes when the program closed.
17 Feb: Supplementary text inserted into a diagram can now be rotated.
1 Feb: Posted the Italian version today. While preparing it, I inadvertently mixed up the English and Italian versions of the 3D File help text, so if you downloaded the English version yesterday, please do it again today!
31 Jan: Minor corrections: The text windows (help files, notebooks, tables) were losing their carets (the blinking thing) now and then, and were not opening files correctly. Also fixed another small error that allowed faulty initialization data to occasionally gum up the 2D zoom function.
17 Jan: The observer coordinates in 3D can now be viewed and manipulated using spherical coordinates. While modifying this dialog box, I noticed that the plotting of points in spherical coordinates had been ruined by an improvement I made on 31 Dec 2004. So, if you have downloaded the program since then, you’ll want to do it again.
15 Jan: It seems that the old “search” function that I installed years ago in text windows no longer works under Windows XP, so I had to revise it.
11 Jan: Fixed a small but annoying glitch, which caused the program to misinterpret some data when the number of displayed decimal digits was set to 0.
10 Jan: Enabled the full array of constructors joina, joinb, ..., joinz for piecewise-defined functions. These are useful for parametrized examples.
6 Jan: The foreign-language versions suffered during the previous update — their main menus were all disabled. Sorry about that!
3 Jan: In 2D, the delete button in the Inventory should have been disabled while polynomial editing was in progress. Now it is.
2004 history.
