I am happy to announce version 3.0.0 of TikZ/pgf. After several years
of development work in the background, a new version is finally ready.  

The big jump in the version number from 2.10 to 3.0.0 is due to the
fact that a lot of new stuff has been added to TikZ (since the last
version, over a thousand lines have been added to the change log...)
and over a hundred bugs have been eliminated. However, care was taken
to make sure that in normal circumstances all old code will still
produce the exact same results as it used to. 

Since it is impossible to list all the changes and improvements since
the last version in this announcement, let me just point out some
hilights: 

- Arrow Tips: The code for specifying and using arrow tips has been
  completely rewritten. You can now configure the appearance of arrow
  tip "to death" and do so on the fly. Arbitrary arrow tips will now
  even bend along curves since TikZ can now do curvilinear
  transformations on a very low level. 

- Syntax Improvements: A lot of small things have been added and
  improved in the syntax. For instance, nodes can be in front of
  paths, but now also behind them. There is the new notion of a "small
  picture" called a "pic", which is something of a mixture of a node
  and a picture, making it easy for normal users to create
  configurable, reusable graphics.  

- A Syntax for Graphs: Creating a larger graph used to require a large
  number of node and edge commands and, possibly, some foreach
  loops. Now there is a new simple syntax for this, borrowed from the
  GraphViz program, that makes it very easy to specify graphs and
  especially trees in a convenient manner.

- Graph Drawing Algorithms: TikZ now comes with a large and powerful
  system for computing the positions of nodes of graphs automatically
  (you need LuaTeX for this, though). A number of common algorithms
  have already been implemented, making it very easy to draw graphs
  now. Also, it is rather simple to implement new graph drawing
  algorithms.

- Data Visualization: There is now an alternative to pgfplots as part
  of the standard TikZ installation for creating plots. While pgfplots
  is still the more mature system, the new data visualization system
  comes with some interesting new ideas.   

- Driver Support: Support for all mayor backend drivers has been
  improved. A new, cool thing is the support for dvisvgm, which
  allows you to create powerful SVG graphics directly from TeX,
  including the text. This support also open the door to interactive
  and animated graphics in future versions since SVG makes it very
  easy to animate arbitrary parts of a graphic. 
