HDF Newsletter 56
November 28, 2000
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CONTENTS
Release of HDF 4.1r4
HDF 4.1r4 is now available. You can obtain this from the HDF(4)
Home Page at:
You can also download it directly from the NCSA anonymous ftp server
from:
The HDF 4.1r4 documentation can be obtained from:
First time users are encouraged to look at the HDF FAQ for this release:
New Features and Changes
This release focuses on new features and changes added to the
GR interface.
- Two new utilities have been added to HDF, gif2hdf and hdf2gif.
The gif2hdf utility will convert a GIF image into an HDF file
containing a GR image. The hdf2gif utility will convert an HDF GR
image into a GIF image.
- Chunking and chunking with compression have been added to the
GR interface.
- JPEG compression with the GR interface was not working properly.
This problem has been fixed.
Several hdp options have been added:
- Added -s option to dumpgr and dumpsds to allow printing data
as a stream instead of breaking the lines at 65 characters.
- Added option -c to dumpgr and dumpsds to allow printing clean output
for attributes with type DFNT_CHAR. With this option, hdp will print
space characters, such as horizontal tabs, CRs, and LFs, as they are
instead of "\digit" (still the default.) This option also prints "..."
for one or more null characters among the data.
- Added option -l to dumpgr to allow printing data in different interlace
modes.
Platforms Tested
HDF 4.1 Release 4 has been tested on the following platforms:
Cray J90 (available after initial 4.1r4 release)
Cray T3E
DEC Alpha/Digital Unix
DEC Alpha/OpenVMS
Exemplar
FreeBSD
HP-UX
IRIX
IRIX64 (-n32, -64)
Linux
Solaris
Solaris x86
SP
Windows NT/98/2000
For more information on the platforms that were tested and for
which we provide pre-compiled binaries, please refer to the following
web page (accessible from the HDF home page):
Known Problems
- The ncgen utility fails on the IBM SP.
Release of Thread-Safe HDF5
The first release of Thread-Safe HDF5 is available from the NCSA ftp server.
This is a beta release. It uses the Pthreads (POSIX threads) library.
You can download it from the page:
For details on what thread safety means in regards to HDF5, refer to
the following paper (April 1999):