[Liblas-devel] libLAS 1.6.0b3 Released

[Howard Butler]

All,

12/15/2010

The libLAS team is pleased to announce the release of libLAS 1.6.0b3.  The OSGeo4W build has also been refreshed to beta 3.

A number of improvements and fixes have been added since beta 2.  These include:

- las2las now has the ability to set color information from GDAL raster files.  You need GDAL linked, of course.  See the usage of las2las <http://liblas.org/utilities/las2las.html#adding-color-from-an-image> for more detail.
- Frank's RFC 2, which implements OGC WKT writing into files, is now in place <http://liblas.org/development/rfc/rfc_2_spatialreference.html>.  Use the --add-wkt-srs option of las2las if you wish to rewrite a file to contain both a GeoTIFF key and OGC WKT VLR entry into the file.  The WKT will be preferred and used if available.
- las2txt overhaul has been started.  It is now possible to output the point data as XML (ugh!) as well as provide a --delimiter argument instead of individual delimiter names.  The full compliment of filtering operations in las2las and lasinfo are also available to las2txt to allow formerly multi-step operations to happen in a single invocation.  las2txt-old is also provided to preserve the old behavior.
- Gary has added iterator-style access to the liblas::Index class.
- Fixed issue with reading global encoding <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/196>
- Fixed issue with writing headers in existing files opened for append <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/195>
- libgeotiff conflicts <http://trac.liblas.org/ticket/194>
- Fixed release issue complaint about CMake not finding README file
- The C++ API is now built as a dynamic library with exported classes.
- A significant refactoring of liblas::Reader and liblas::Writer has taken place.  A consequence of this factoring is the SetOutputSRS-style methods of the C API are currently broken.  New C API methods to replace this functionality (the previous ones will be no-op'd) will be provided in beta 4.  C++ users can use the TransformI ReprojectionTransform object and set that on the liblas::Reader or liblas::Writer classes to continue perform reprojection actions.

Howard