PyGMT v0.3.1 released
Announcing PyGMT v0.3.1, a patch release with multiple bug fixes and an improved gallery!
The ever-growing PyGMT team now presents version v0.3.1, a release with 7 new gallery examples, an improved gallery design, and much more! The highlights for this release include:
- Reorganized gallery examples into new categories (#995)
- Added gallery examples for plotting vectors (#950, #890)
- Last version to support GMT 6.1.1, future PyGMT versions will require GMT 6.2.0 or newer
The full list of changes can be found in the changelog. Installation/Upgrade instructions can be found at Installing — PyGMT, or you can try it online first at try-gmt! A big shout out to new contributor @core-man for making cool gallery examples for a double y-axes graph and an inset map showing a rectangular region. Thank you also to @aliciaha1997 and @tawandamoyo for some quick fixes to our documentation; we appreciate all contributions be it big or small and we hope to see you around more 
!
Another big shoutout to @kmaterna and @michaelgrund for adding new 
gallery examples on plotting Cartesian, circular and geographic vectors and plotting different vector heads and tails respectively! Our new maintainer @michaelgrund has also added gallery examples showing different line fronts and polar projections. Last but not least, thank you to @seisman, @weiji14, @meghanj, and @willschlitzer for lots of maintenance 
and review 
work behind the scenes, and to @pwessel and the core GMT team for fixing bugs 
and so much more!
The PyGMT gallery has been reorganized into new categories, and we encourage you to check it out!
Roadmap to v0.4.0
There are a ton of new features being planned for the next release (many of which we need help with!):
-
Integration with the rest of the PyData
ecosystem: -
Beginner
friendly tutorials: -
Other features/enhancements
:- Allow passing in a list/array of angle/font/justify values to text (#483)
- Wrap more GMT modules, e.g., velo (#525), xyz2grd (#636), triangulate (#731), solar (#804), rose (#794) and histogram (#593)
- Improve the
Figure.show()method for displaying previews (#529) - Add
Figure.hlines()andFigure.vlines()for plotting horizontal and vertical lines (#670)
Upcoming deprecations
No one likes things to break. But, these changes are planned for PyGMT v0.4.0 to ensure that we deliver a bug-free product and that everything is consistent:
- Require Numpy>=1.17 as per NEP 29 — Recommend Python and Numpy version support as a community policy standard (see #690), i.e. drop Numpy <= 1.16. Please upgrade as soon as possible!
- Require GMT>=6.2.0, i.e. drop GMT<=6.1.1. For the brave folks, feel free to test using
conda install -c conda-forge/label/dev gmt. - The ‘columns’ (
i) parameter infig.plotandfig.contourwill likely be renamed to something else, see discussion at #764
The compatibility matrix will be listed on PyGMT, so make sure you keep things up to date!
Call for contributors
Contributing takes many forms, and is not just about writing code! Helping out can include social media outreach, writing/improving documentation and more! We value diversity 
and international 
collaboration, and need you to make it happen:
+ Design a fresh new PyGMT logo!- PyGMT tutorial at SciPy 2021 (12-13 July 2021) - the tutorial proposal has been submitted and we’ll need help with making Jupyter notebooks in the coming months
Outreachy remote internships for supporting diversity (~Aug/Sep 2021) - need funding/volunteers/people good at proposal writing- More PyGMT community meetings online! See the last one held on early Feb 2021. We’ll look into doing more before each PyGMT release (quarterly?).
Writing up a PyGMT paper (see #677) sometime in 2021/2022.
Don’t know where to start? Go to Contribute to GenericMappingTools/pygmt · GitHub or reach out to us here on the forum)!
Enjoy 
P.S. Check out the new GMT twitter 
handle @gmt_dev and spread the word!