Announcement for CGAL-4.7-beta1

Maintenance/public_release/announcement/mailing-beta.eml

@@ -1,65 +1,94 @@
-Subject: CGAL 4.6 Beta 1 Released, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
+Subject: CGAL 4.7 Beta 1 Released, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
 Body: 
 
-The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.6 Beta 1
+The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.7 Beta 1
 of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.
 
-CGAL version 4.6 Beta 1 is a public testing release. It should provide
+CGAL version 4.7 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.
+release of the final version of CGAL 4.7 in September.
 
 
 Besides fixes to existing packages, the following has changed since
-CGAL 4.5:
+CGAL 4.6:
+
+  o Installation
+
+    - The minimum required version of CMake is now 2.8.11. CMake versions 3.1,
+      3.2, and 3.3 are supported.
+
+    - All Qt4 demos have been updated and now require Qt5 to be
+      compiled. Qt5 version 5.3 or higher is required. The support for Qt4
+      is dropped. The code of the 3D demos now use modern OpenGL, with
+      shaders, instead of the fixed pipeline API of OpenGL-1.
 
 
-  o 2D Generalized Barycentric Coordinates (new package)
+  o Advancing Front Surface Reconstruction (new package)
 
-    This package offers an efficient and robust implementation of two-
-    dimensional closed-form generalized barycentric coordinates defined for
-    simple two-dimensional polygons.
+    This package provides a greedy algorithm for surface reconstruction from an
+    unorganized point set. Starting from a seed facet, a piecewise linear
+    surface is grown by adding Delaunay triangles one by one. The most
+    plausible triangles are added first, in a way that avoids the appearance of
+    topological singularities.
 
 
-  o Scale-Space Surface Reconstruction (new package)
+  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Shortest Paths (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.
+    The package provides methods for computing shortest path on triangulated
+    surface meshes. Given a set of source points on the surface, this package
+    provides a data structure that can efficiently provides the shortest path
+    from any point on the surface to the sources points. There is no
+    restriction on the genus or the number of connnected components of the
+    mesh.
 
 
-  o Surface Mesh (new package)
+  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Skeletonization (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.
+    This package provides a (1D) curve skeleton extraction algorithm for a
+    triangulated polygonal mesh without borders based on the mean curvature
+    flow. The particularity of this skeleton is that it captures the topology
+    of the input. For each skeleton vertex one can obtain its location and its
+    corresponding vertices from the input mesh. The code is generic and works
+    with any model of the `FaceListGraph` concept.
 
 
-  o Triangulation (new package)
+  o Polygon Mesh Processing (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.
+    This package implements a collection of methods and classes for polygon
+    mesh processing, ranging from basic operations on simplices, to complex
+    geometry processing algorithms. The implementation of this package mainly
+    follows algorithms and references given in Botsch et al.'s book on polygon
+    mesh processing.
 
 
-  o 2D Triangulations
+  o 3D Point-Set Shape Detection (new package)
 
-    The class Constrained_triangulation_plus_2 now can handle polylines as
-    constraints.
+    This package implements the efficient RANSAC method for shape detection,
+    contributed by Schnabel et al. From an unstructured point set with
+    unoriented normals, the algorithm detects a set of shapes. Five types of
+    primitive shapes are provided by this package: plane, sphere, cylinder,
+    cone and torus. Detecting other types of shapes is possible by implementing
+    a class derived from a base shape.
 
 
-  o Spatial Searching
+  o L Infinity Segment Delaunay Graphs (new package)
+
+    The package provides the geometric traits for constructing the segment
+    Delaunay graph in the max-norm (L Infinity). The traits also contain
+    methods to draw the edges of the dual of the segment Delaunay graph in the
+    max-norm i.e., the segment Voronoi diagram in the max-norm. The algorithm
+    and traits rely on the segment Delaunay graph algorithm and traits under
+    the Euclidean distance. The segment Voronoi diagram in the max-norm has
+    applications in VLSI CAD.
+
+
+  o 2D Visibility (new package)
+
+    This package provides several variants to compute the visibility area of a
+    point within polygonal regions in two dimensions.
 
-    - 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.