[Paraview] ParaView 2.4 beta release

[Amy Squillacote]

Hi All,

The ParaView 2.4 beta release (version 2.4.0) is now available for 
download from the ParaView web site: 
http://www.paraview.org/HTML/Download.html.  It is also available 
through CVS; the tag is ParaView-2-4-0.  If you find bugs in the 
release, please e-mail me; preferably also send me a patch file to 
fix the problem.  There have been several changes since the 2.2 
release of ParaView; they include the following.

* Improved multi-block and AMR support. Since ParaView 2.2, there has 
been various improvements to the multi-group code. These include bug 
fixes, filter and reader improvements. The EnSight and PLOT3D readers 
have been converted to read multi-block datasets. XML based writers 
and readers for all supported multi-group datasets have been added.

* Movies and screen captures are now rendered offscreen. This works 
on all platforms with the new offscreen support.

* Better handling of empty data. This situation commonly occurs when 
dealing with distributed data. Some of the nodes may have empty data. 
Some filters misbehaved when encountering empty datasets.

* Better handling of failure to open display on server side (on X). 
If the render server cannot open one or more of it's displays, 
compositing is disabled and the user is warned.

* Fixed bug that prevented certain writers from working in server/client mode.

* New and improved Spy Plot CTH reader:
   - Lower memory footprint
   - Ability to down-convert volume fraction to unsigned char
   - Store data arrays as float (instead of double)

* Support for ParaView internals scripts
   - Sites can customize paraview to perform certain tasks when run 
with special arguments
   - For example, "paraview script:ExodusMeta <exodus file> <meta 
file>" will load an exodus file with a meta file.

* Support for selecting functions from Plot3D files

* Data page shows list of arrays with their type, number of 
components, and value range

* Initial support for Python wrapping


The web site lists precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac 
OSX.  Hope you enjoy the new release.

Amy Squillacote
Kitware, Inc.