April 9, 2007: Release 1.8

 This release contains minor bugfixes and portability improvements.
 Rotation is now implemented in the PDF backend.

March 6, 2005: Release 1.7
 
 This is a bugfix release. A bug in the progress bar code, which
 caused arithmetic exceptions on some 64-bit architectures, has been
 fixed.

February 27, 2005: Release 1.6

 This release contains an algorithm improvement that leads to a
 speedup of 20-60% over previous versions of Potrace. A new PDF
 backend was added, courtesy of Tor Andersson. An option --progress
 was added for displaying a progress bar. The Windows version of
 Potrace now uses MinGW instead of Cygwin, eliminating the need to
 install a special DLL alongside the executable programs, and solving
 some problems with wildcards and executable PostScript files. Some
 spurious "premature end of file" messages were eliminated. The
 core functionality of Potrace was separated into a library with a
 documented API, making it easier for developers to incorporate
 Potrace into other GPL-licensed software.

July 8, 2004: Release 1.5

 The LZW patent has finally expired in Canada. Therefore, postscript
 level 2 compression can now be implemented directly within Potrace,
 without having to rely on the external "compress" program. This
 release makes the necessary corrections.

March 6, 2004: Release 1.4

 This is a bugfix release. Fixed the bug which sometimes caused
 Potrace to "hang" on large input files. Also fixed some bugs in the
 compression code. The presence of the "compress" program is now
 determined at run-time, rather than compile-time. No new features or
 command line options were added.

January 15, 2004: Release 1.3

 This is primarily a bugfix release. Version 1.2 fatally crashed when
 applied to an empty (all white) bitmap. The options -2 and -3 are now
 ignored when unsupported, rather than causing an error.  There were
 some improvements to the test suite, autoconfiguration, and
 portability. The bounding box in the xfig backend was fixed, and the
 postscript output now has better page encapsulation. Bitmaps of
 dimension 0 are now tolerated better.

December 23, 2003: Release 1.2

 New experimental Gimppath and XFig backends were added.  A separate
 program mkbitmap was added, which can be used as a preprocessor to
 Potrace. It turns greyscale or color images into high-quality
 bitmaps with optional scaling and filtering. New options --opaque,
 --group, and --fillcolor were added for greater flexibility in
 generating editable PostScript and SVG output. The bitmap
 decomposition algorithm was improved and can now take advantage of
 64-bit platforms.  Portability and autoconfiguration were vastly
 improved, and a test suite was added. Runlength encoded BMP files can
 now be read. Some bugs in command line options were fixed.

August 18, 2003: Release 1.1

 The most important new feature of this release is an SVG (scalable
 vector graphics) backend. This file format can be read by vector
 graphics manipulation programs such as sodipodi, as well as web
 browsers with an SVG plugin. I also added PGM, PPM, and BMP as
 additional input file formats. The new --blacklevel and --invert
 options control how non-black-and-white images are converted to
 bitmaps before being processed by Potrace. The implementation of a
 critical function has been improved to make Potrace even faster on
 large input files; this results in speedups of up to factor 3.3
 relative to Potrace 1.0. Autoconfiguration was improved, and the code
 was polished to compile on more different architectures. The error
 messages for wrong file formats were also improved.

August 10, 2003: Release 1.0

 First public release.
