CGAL users discussion list

[Benjamin Kehlet <>]

Not as far as I know (but Laurent knows :-) ), but Dolfin does: https://bitbucket.org/fenics-project/dolfin/src/4fa2f7031f769d4991b5233b478abe1c92dddc2a/dolfin/io/VTKWriter.cpp?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default

VTKWriter::write_base64_mesh could maybe serve as a starting point (of course assuming the license (LGPL) is not a show stopper).

Regards

Benjamin

On 24 August 2017 at 13:15, Michael Bieri <> wrote:

Benjamin, I think that's exactly what I've been looking for. Does CGAL itself offer a function to write the VTK format? I think it's a matter of an hour or so to write a writer, but why reinvent the wheel if it's maybe already there... (I would prefer not to use any code from VTK in my project, in order to keep the number of dependencies low.)

Best regards,

Michael

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 12:45 PM, Laurent Rineau (CGAL/GeometryFactory) <> wrote:

Le Thursday, August 24, 2017 11:41:17 AM CEST Michael Bieri a écrit :
> Thanks Laurent for your answer.
>
> Writing the file seems to work, but first of all, the file is even larger
> than the ASCII medit format. Second, I have no idea about the file format.
> As far as I see it just writes the internal binary representation into a
> file? I guess that's not easy to process with a program outside of the CGAL
> world?

Indeed, those functions are supposed to work in pair: the function to save
and the function to load. The format ensures that (almost) all the
information is saved and restored (but the information on edges of 1D-
curves).

I am not sure to know why the resulting file are larger than the export in
ASCII. Probably because the export in ASCII looses a lot of information
(especially if you have not set the precision of ASCII representation of
doubles to 17), where the binary I/O functions save and load almost
everything.

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


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