Version 4.8.0 is to be considered a major release.  The system should be
closely upward compatible.  The most important changes are faster
graphics, much better colour support and display of 16-bit fonts:


1) Full 8-bit text representation (including `0' characters) as well as
   16-bit (wide) character representation.  See class char_array and
   class text_buffer for details.

   Display of both 8-bit and 16-bit X11 fonts, allowing for the display
   of Azian character sets.  Input of these is not yet handled, but will 
   be added shortly.

2) The definition of a `Virtual Window Interface' with implementations
   for X11R[345] and MS-Windows-3.1 allows for a compatible XPCE library
   over Unix and MS-Windows.

3) More intelligent redraw planning.  Instead of simply accumulating and
   redrawing the bounding box of changed objects, the current version
   accumulates multiple update-areas and checks for user-events between
   partial updates to quit screen update if events are present.

   Seperately, the redraw for class text_image (underlying editor/view
   and list_browser/browser) is changed considerably, providing much
   faster redraw and less memory resources on the X-server as well as
   in XPCE itself.

4) Improved colour handling: pixmaps (coloured bitmaps) can in most
   cases be mixed with colours.  Inverting images is avoided in many
   places as this gives unpredicatable results on colour displays.
   Pseudo 3-d versions of all dialog_item objects have been defined.

5) Resource handling (interface to ~/.Xdefaults) is changed considerably
   in a NON-COMPATIBLE MANNER.  That is, the programmers interface is
   compatible, but resource specifications look very different.

   The syntax for objects no longer depends on the conversion from a
   textual description specified by the class, but on a general syntax
   close to the Prolog syntax.  See @resource_parser for details.

   The new syntax helps distinquish ambiguities and allows for
   conditional resource values, which are used to differentiate between
   monochrome and colour displays. See the systems default file Pce for
   examples.

   Inheritance of resources has been cleaned and resource caching
   provides faster access to resource values.

6) Some graphical improvements: `Transparent' bitmaps are now supported
   and so are background colours for class text and background
   specification for class style (allowing for display of text-fragments
   using different backgrounds).

7) Many fixes and local improvements.  See ChangeLog for details.
