HDF Newsletter 64
November 7, 2001
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CONTENTS
Release of HDF4.1r5
HDF 4.1r5 is now available. This release contains several new functions as
well as numerous bug fixes. You can obtain it from the HDF (4) home page:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/hdf4.html
You can also download it directly from the NCSA anonymous ftp server
from:
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF/HDF_Current/
The HDF 4.1r5 documentation can be obtained from:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/doc.html
First time users are encouraged to look at the HDF FAQ for this release:
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF-FAQ.html
New Features and Changes
- The following Vdata routines were added:
- VSsetblocksize/vsfsetblsz -- Sets the block size of the linked-block element.
- VSsetnumblocks/vsfsetnmbl -- Sets the number of blocks for a linked-block element.
- VSgetblockinfo/vsfgetblinfo -- Retrieves the block size and
the number of blocks of a linked-block element.
- Two routines were added to get compression information for the SD and
GR interfaces, including chunked elements: SDgetcompress/sfgcompress
and GRgetcompress/mggcompress.
Note:
- For a JPEG image, GRgetcompress only returns the compression type, not
the compression information (i.e, quantity and force_baseline). This
information is not currently retrievable.
- Getting compression type for JPEG chunked images is not working yet.
- "hdp dumpgr" has a new option, -pd, to print palette data only. Also,
whenever option -p or -pd is given, only palettes are printed, and no
images or file attributes.
- A new FORTRAN function, heprntf (HEprint), was added. It takes two
arguments: file name and level. If the file name string has 0 length,
then error messages will be printed to standard output.
- On Windows, the unresolved symbol (error_top) error has been fixed when
calling HEclear and linking with the DLL. Users who want to use the HDF
DLL should define HDFAPDLL in their applications. Simply go to Project
Settings and add HDFAPDLL as the predefined constant.
- A memory leak in the netCDF portion of the HDF/mfhdf distribution
was fixed.
- The "#define NULL" was removed since ANSI C compilers are required to
define NULL.
- When using "hdp dumpgr", data was being printed in the range of 0-250
when it should have been between 0-168. This problem is now fixed.
Please refer to the bugs_fixed.txt file for more details on bugs that were
fixed.
Platforms Tested
HDF 4.1 Release 5 has been tested on the following platforms:
Cray SV1 10.0.0.8
Cray T3E sn6711 2.0.5.55
Compaq Tru64 Unix (OSF1) 5.1
DEC Alpha/OpenVMS AXP 7.2-1
FreeBSD 4.4
HP-UX B.11.00
IBM SP 4.3
IRIX 6.5
IRIX64 6.5 (-n32, -64)
Linux 2.2.18smp
Solaris 2.7, 2.8
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):
http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/platforms.html
Dropping Support for Exemplar
We are dropping support for the Exemplar with future releases
of HDF 4.x.