GNU Octave 5.1 Released With HiDPI Support, Drops OSMesa Usage

GNU Octave, the numerical computing software package that competes with the likes of MATLAB, is up to version 5.1 with several improvements in tow.

First up, the Octave's plotting system finally has HiDPI support so it looks better on modern retina/HiDPI displays. Octave 5.1 is still supporting the Qt4 tool-kit too but they recommend users build against any version of Qt5.

Octave 5.1 adds a number of new functions, printing to raster formats now uses an OpenGL-based method by default, new print options for PDF and PostScript, the ability to make ASCII art for plots, the FFTW library is now required for FFT calculations, and the OSMesa library is no longer used for offscreen rendering but rather Qt's off-screen surface capabilities are utilized.

More details on this big upgrade to the GNU Octave system can be found via the project site at GNU.org.