[Liblas-devel] las2las2 vertical crs VerticalCitationGeoKey

[Howard Butler]

On Oct 5, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Allan Adair wrote:

> I ran across something when defining and retrieving spatial/vertical reference information using las2las2 and lasinfo. I grabbed the source yesterday and did a build. Here is an example of using the las2las2 utility:
> 
> las2las2.exe --input LID35094D7NEC.las --a_srs PROJCS["NAD83 / UTM zone 15N",GEOGCS["NAD83",DATUM["North_American_Datum_1983",SPHEROID["GRS 1980",6378137,298.257222101,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7019"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","6269"]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],UNIT["degree",0.01745329251994328,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","4269"]],UNIT["metre",1,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9001"]],PROJECTION["Transverse_Mercator"],PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],PARAMETER["central_meridian",-93],PARAMETER["scale_factor",0.9996],PARAMETER["false_easting",500000],PARAMETER["false_northing",0],AUTHORITY["EPSG","26915"],AXIS["Easting",EAST],AXIS["Northing",NORTH]] --a_vertcs 5703 "North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88)" 5103 9001
> 
> This creates an "output.las" by default with the new spatial/vertical reference information. Here is part of the output when using the lasinfo to retrieve the spatial/vertical reference information:

>       VerticalCitationGeoKey (Ascii,47): "North American Vertical Datum of 1988
> (NAVD88╠"
> 
> Ignoring the error messages at the beginning of the output, I see that there is a symbol at the end of the "VerticalCitationGeoKey". I get the same issue if I alter the text, the last character is not visible and is replaced with the same unwanted piece of data. Outside of aesthetics, will this affect how the vertical reference information is interpreted by software that supports these tags?

It would seem this is a bug in las2las2 or somewhere in the stack of software that sets the vertical geotiff keys in the file.  I see the same bug when I run on OS X just now as well.  Thank you for the report.

Howard