[Liblas-devel] libLAS 1.2.0b1

[Howard Butler]

2/25/09

All,

I am pleased to announce the release of 1.2.0b1.  Numerous  
improvements have been made to libLAS in this release, including  
support for LAS 1.2.  One significant API change was also made.

API Change
------------------
- LASHeader::GetProj4 and LASHeader::SetProj4 in the C++ API and  
LASHeader_GetProj4 and LASHeader_SetProj4 in the C API have been  
removed http://liblas.org/ticket/97

I'm willing to back out this removal if people thing it is too drastic  
of a change, but I thought it would be better to get it gone now  
before libLAS' usage increases significantly.  If libLAS' usage is  
already high ;), and this is a problem, please let me know and we can  
add it back.  These methods are no longer needed with the new LASSRS  
interface.

Additions
-----------------

LAS 1.2 support has been added.  This includes RGB color support for  
the two different PointFormats described in the 1.2 specification.  
Nothing is currently done to alter the interpretation of the time  
values, which is the only other difference that the 1.2 specification  
makes. It is currently up to the client software to know and alter  
time interpretation based on the global encoding value in the header.

libLAS' spatial reference system support has been dramatically  
improved.  A new class, LASSRS (and its C cousin LASSRSH), has been  
added to encapsulate the SRS information for LAS files.  As I've  
described in earlier emails, libLAS SRS granularity will improve or  
degrade depending on whether or not you link in libgeotiff or GDAL (or  
nothing at all, obviously).  Get/SetProj4 and Get/SetWKT methods are  
now available on the LASSRS class to create an SRS that can be added  
to a LASHeader before writing into the file.

libLAS also supports the ability to link directly against a GDAL  
source tree and skip linking against both libgeotiff and GDAL.  The  
GDAL source tree must be used if you plan to do this, as many of  
libgeotiff's headers are not included in a default GDAL build.  This  
optional build approach has only been tested with the latest GDAL  
trunk, as libgeotiff was recently updated there to provide the  
simpletags GeoTIFF keys that libLAS uses.

Numerous other small updates and improvements.  See http://liblas.org/log/ 
  for a short summary.

Note that no Python release is going to be done for the betas because  
it will end up superseding the current release in PyPI.   The Python  
API has been updated to include LASColor and LASSRS support as well,  
but it will not be released until libLAS 1.2 goes final.  If you need  
to test Python, you will have to utilize libLAS trunk or one of the  
beta tags in subversion.

http://liblas.org/wiki/1.2.0b1

Howard