Summary of important user-visible changes for version 5.0 (yyyy-mm-dd):
----------------------------------------------------------------------

 ** The functions issymmetric and ishermitian accept an option "nonskew"
    or "skew" to calculate the symmetric or skew-symmetric property
    of a matrix.  Performance has also been increased.

 ** The issorted function now uses a direction option of "ascend" or
    "descend" to make it compatible with both the sort function and
    with Matlab.  Change all uses of "ascending" and "descending" in
    existing code to the new options.

 ** Figure graphic objects have a new property "Number" which is
    read-only and will return the handle (number) of the figure.
    However, if the property "IntegerHandle" has been set to "off" then
    the property will return an empty matrix ([]).

 ** Printing using the -dtiff output device will now create compressed
    images using lzw compression.  This change was made for Matlab
    compatibility.  To produce uncompressed images use the -dtiffn
    device.

 ** The FFTW library is now required to perform FFT calculations.  The
    FFTPACK sources have been removed from Octave.

 ** The OSMesa library is no longer used.  To print invisible figures
    when using OpenGL graphics, the Qt QOFFSCREENSURFACE feature must be
    available and you must use the qt graphics toolkit.

 ** Deprecated functions.

    The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 5.0 and will
    be removed from Octave 7 (or whatever version is the second major
    release after 5.0):

      Function             | Replacement
      ---------------------|------------------
                           |

 ** The following functions were deprecated in Octave 4.2 and have been
    removed from Octave 5.0.

      Function             | Replacement
      ---------------------|------------------
      bitmax               | flintmax
      mahalanobis          | mahal in Octave-Forge statistics pkg
      md5sum               | hash
      octave_config_info   | __octave_config_info__
      onenormest           | normest1
      sleep                | pause
      usleep               | pause
      wavread              | audioread
      wavwrite             | audiowrite

 ** Deprecated graphics properties.

    The following properties or allowed corresponding values have been
    deprecated in Octave 5.0 and will be removed from Octave 7 (or whatever
    version is the second major release after 5.0):

      Object               | Property                | Value
      ---------------------|-------------------------|-------------------
                           |                         |

 ** The following properties or allowed corresponding values were
    deprecated in Octave 4.2 and have been removed from Octave 5.0:

      Object               | Property                | Value
      ---------------------|-------------------------|-------------------
      axes                 | xaxislocation           | "zero"
                           | yaxislocation           | "zero"
      patch                | normalmode              |
      surface              | normalmode              |

---------------------------------------------------------

See NEWS.4 for old news.