CGAL users discussion list

[Andreas Meyer <>]

The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release candidate
for Release 3.3 of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

You can download the tarball from
ftp://ftp.mpi-sb.mpg.de/pub/outgoing/CGAL/CGAL-3.3-RC1.tar.gz

For Windows we also provide an installer, with precompiled libraries
ftp://ftp.mpi-sb.mpg.de/pub/outgoing/CGAL/CGAL-3.3-Setup.exe

The online version of the manual can be found at
http://www.cgal.org/Manual/3.3/doc_html/cgal_manual/contents.html


We are looking forward to get your feedback and plan to release CGAL-3.3
one week from today.


Besides improvements of existing packages this release offers
the following new algorithms and data structures.


 o Surface Mesh Simplification

  This package provides a mesh simplification framework using edge collapse
  operations, and provides the Turk/Lindstrom simplification algorithm.


 o Estimation of Local Differential Properties

  This package allows to compute local differential quantities of a surface
  from a point sample.


 o Approximation of Ridges and Umbilics on Triangulated Surface Meshes

  This package enables the approximation of differential features on
  triangulated surface meshes. Such curvature related features are
  lines: ridges or crests, and points: umbilics.


 o Envelopes of Curves in 2D

  This package contains two sets of functions that construct the lower and
  upper envelope diagram for a given range of bounded or unbounded curves.


 o Envelopes of Surfaces in 3D

  This package contains two sets of functions that construct the lower and
  upper envelope diagram for a given range of bounded or unbounded surfaces.
  The envelope diagram is realized as a 2D arrangement.


 o Minkowski Sums in 2D

  This package contains functions for computing planar Minkowski sums of two
  closed polygons,  and for a polygon and a disc (an operation also known as
  offsetting or dilating a polygon).
  The package also contains an efficient approximation algorithm for the
  offset computation,  which provides a guaranteed approximation bound while
  significantly expediting the running times w.r.t. the exact computation
  procedure.


 o CGAL and the Boost Graph Library

  This package provides the glue layer for several CGAL data structures such
  that they become models of the BGL graph concept.


 o Spatial Sorting

  This package allows to sort points and other objects along a Hilbert curve
  which can improve the performance of algorithms like triangulations.
  It is used by the constructors of the triangulation package which have
  an iterator range of points as argument.


 o Linear and Quadratic Programming Solver

  This package contains algorithms for minimizing linear and convex quadratic
  functions over polyhedral domains, described by linear equations and
  inequalities.



See also the Package Overview at
http://www.cgal.org/Manual/3.3/doc_html/cgal_manual/packages.html