CGAL users discussion list

["Laurent Rineau (CGAL/GeometryFactory)" <>]

The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.6 Beta 1
of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

CGAL version 4.6 Beta 1 is a public testing release. It should provide
a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before the
release of the final version of CGAL 4.6 in March.


Besides fixes to existing packages, the following has changed since
CGAL 4.5:


  o 2D Generalized Barycentric Coordinates (new package)

    This package offers an efficient and robust implementation of two-
    dimensional closed-form generalized barycentric coordinates defined for
    simple two-dimensional polygons.


  o Scale-Space Surface Reconstruction (new package)

    This new package provides a class gathering a dedicated smoothing
    algorithm and some convenience functions to help the creation of a
    surface out of a point set using the 3D Alpha Shapes package. The
    particularity of this reconstruction pipeline is that the input point
    are in the output and no new points are created. Note that in the
    current version, the output is a triangle soup that is not necessarily
    a valid (manifold) polyhedral surface.


  o Surface Mesh (new package)

    The surface mesh class provided by this package is an implementation of
    the halfedge data structure allowing to represent polyhedral surfaces.
    It is an alternative to the packages CGAL::Polyhedron_3 and
    CGAL::HalfedgeDS.


  o Triangulation (new package)

    This new package provides classes for manipulating triangulations in
    Euclidean spaces whose dimension can be specified at compile-time or at
    run-time.


  o 2D Triangulations

    The class Constrained_triangulation_plus_2 now can handle polylines as
    constraints.


  o Spatial Searching

    - Improved performance of Orthogonal_k_neighbor_search.

    - Breaking change: The concept OrthogonalDistance has new function
      overloads for min_distance_to_rectangle and max_distance_to_rectangle
      with an additional reference parameter std::vector.


See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.


The CGAL project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust,
easy-to-use, and efficient C++ software library of geometric data
structures and algorithms, like
- triangulations (2D constrained triangulations, Delaunay triangulations
  and periodic triangulations in 2D and 3D),
- Voronoi diagrams (for 2D and 3D points, 2D additively weighted
  Voronoi diagrams, and segment Voronoi diagrams),
- Boolean operations on polygons and polyhedra,
- regularized Boolean operations on polygons with curved arcs
- arrangements of curves,
- mesh generation (2D, 3D and surface mesh generation,
  surface mesh subdivision and parametrization),
- alpha shapes (in 2D and 3D),
- convex hull algorithms (in 2D, 3D and dD),
- operations on polygons (straight skeleton and offset polygon),
- search structures (kd trees for nearest neighbor search, and
  range and segment trees),
- interpolation (natural neighbor interpolation and placement of
  streamlines),
- optimization algorithms (smallest enclosing sphere of points or
  spheres, smallest enclosing ellipsoid of points, principal
  component analysis),
- kinetic data structures




Some modules are distributed under the terms of the LGPL Open Source
license (GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later versions).
Most modules are distributed under the terms of the GPL Open Source
license (GNU General Public License v3 or later versions).
If your intended usage does not meet the criteria of the
aforementioned licenses, a commercial license can be purchased from
GeometryFactory (http://www.geometryfactory.com/).


For further information and for downloading the library and its
documentation, please visit the CGAL web site: http://www.cgal.org/


-- 
Laurent Rineau, PhD
R&D Engineer at GeometryFactory           http://www.geometryfactory.com/
Release Manager of the CGAL Project       http://www.cgal.org/