We’re happy to announce the availability of the first minor patch release of the big release we made two months ago. This release contains minor improvements and bug fixes only.

In the plot we now allow to change the background color for axis labels. This is useful if you place the axis labels above the axis line and don’t want to see an underlying line in the bounding box of the label. The default setting is that the background remain transparent.

For the cursor, the tool used to measure positions and distances in the plots, we now allow you to copy the values in the result window to the clipboard.

When pasting new values into LabPlot’s spreadsheet, the auto-detection of the datatime format has been improved. We now better recognize the different formats produced in external programs and being pasted into LabPlot.

Many smaller improvements were included in the dialog for the creation of the live-data sources related to the handling of errors coming from remote servers like MQTT brokers, etc. Besides the more stable behavior, the user now also gets clearer notifications about what went wrong. Furthermore, when reading live data it is possible to generate the timestamp column in LabPlot for the data being read also for TCP and UDP network sources. This was only possible for MQTT sources in the past.

The bug fixes address some of the annoying issues that were known for quite some time already, but also new issues reported by the users after the release 2.8. Below is the list of all relevant bug fixes:

  • Fixed compiling with Cantor 20.08.X and X>0
  • Fixed drawing lines between points of datetime data
  • Fixed drawing axis tick label in color when in HTML mode
  • Fixed size of dock widgets when changing between them
  • BUG 389920 – removed sub-window shadow remnants when closing the project
  • BUG 428029 – changed font of text label for newer Qt versions
  • BUG 428813 – solved full screen not restored (also fixed full screen on macOS)
  • BUG 428698 – solved crash when doing drag&drop between different main windows
  • Fixed missing settings dialog on macOS
  • Parser improvements (found in “Generate Function Values”):
    • Fixed Crash using variable name of pre-defined functions as function (“sin()”)
    • Allow variable names containing function names (“sina”)
    • Correctly remove variables when changing name
    • Use application number locale
    • Insert predefined functions with correct number of arguments

We encourage everybody to update to 2.8.1 to enjoy these improvements.