If you are a mac user, you may have noticed some “changes” with the latest “Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2”. Negative symptoms seem to vary from user to user but generally involve font issues in the editor. The following screenshot is from my mac; you can see the undesirably large fonts and the oddly mis-sized tabs at the bottom. If you haven’t noticed any problems, that’s good; you can go about your business.

For those of you affected, we have a few workarounds that ameliorate some of the issues:

• Font Size

Try replacing Monospace 12-pt with Andale Mono or Courrier New 9-pt in the editor font preferences. I haven’t tried Ken’s preferred Bitstream Vera Sans Monospaced, but that might be fine, too.

• Print Orientation

If you’re trying to print a figure or model and the “print page setup orientation” is disabled, you can print from the command line using the following commands to produce a PDF-file on disk in landscape format which can then be printed with the Preview application:

 orient landscape
 print('-dpdf')

• Buttons and Toolbars

We don’t have a workaround for the sizing and inset issues, but we are coding up some new stuff for a future release.

Some of you may be wondering “how could we let this happen?” We have been working with Sun and Apple over the years to fix bugs, and they have been quite responsive to our needs, but we have very different release schedules and priorities, and so tests and resolutions are not able to be synchronized.

We test out MATLAB on various pre-release builds of all our platforms that helps both us and our vendors resolve issues before an official release. But, as some of you may know, some things always seem to change with the official release. We’re working hard to resolve all the new issues, and we hope that you continue to enjoy the over-all increase in quality, usefulness of features, and increased “mac-iness” of MATLAB.

On the positive side this update fixes a number of other bugs that have been plaguing us. If you notice additional issues or are having difficulty with these workarounds, please create a technical support request.

In completely unrelated news, check out our sweet new avatars. If they become popular enough, maybe I’ll make it into a tattoo ;-)