[vtkusers] VTK Textbook 3rd Edition, VTK User's Guide 4.2, VTK 4.2 Beta

[Ken Martin]

Hello Folks,

 

I am pleased to announce that the third edition of the VTK Textbook is
finally in stock (we have 100 copies right now and are expecting 500
more by Friday) and available for purchase from
http://www.kitware.com/products/vtktextbook.html Likewise the VTK 4.2
version of the user's/developer's guide is now available at
http://www.kitware.com/products/vtkguide.html Finally the Beta release
of VTK 4.2 is available from http://www.vtk.org/files/release/4.2 A
summary of significant changes (from the FAQ) is included below. With
VTK 4.2 we will be releasing patches during its lifetime. So there will
be versions  4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3 etc as bugs are reported and fixed.

 

Thanks

Ken

 

 

+ Use of macros to support serialization, standardize the New method,
and provide the Superclass typedef. 

+ Subclassing of VTK classes in the python wrappers (virtual method
hooks are not provided). 

+ vtkImageWindow, vtkImager, vtkTkImageWindowWidget and their subclasses
have been removed to reduce duplicated code and enable interation in
ImageWindows. Now people should use vtkRenderer and vtkRenderWindow
instead. vtkImageViewer still works as a turn key image viewing class
although it now uses vtkRenderWindow and vtkRenderer internally instead
of vtkImageWindow and vtkImager. 

+ New class: vtkBandedPolyDataContourFilter. Creates solid colored bands
(like you find on maps) of scalar value. 

+ Event processing: Several new events to VTK were added (see
vtkCommand.h). Also event processing can now be prioritized and aborted.
This allows applications to manage who processes which events, and
terminates the processing of a particular event if desired. 

+ 3D Widgets: A new class vtkInteractorObserver was added to observe
events on vtkRenderWindowInteractor. Using the new event processing
infrastructure, multiple 3D widgets (subclasses of
vtkInteractorObserver) can be used simultaneously to process
interactions. Several new 3D widgets have been added including: 

  - vtkLineWidget
  - vtkPlaneWidget
  - vtkImagePlaneWidget
  - vtkBoxWidget
  - vtkSphereWidget

Besides providing a representation, widgets also provide auxiliary
functionality such as providing transforms, implicit functions, plane
normals, sphere radius and center, etc. 

+ New class: vtkInstantiator provides a means by which one can create an
instance of a VTK class using only the name of the class as a string. 

+ New class: vtkXMLParser provides a wrapper around the Expat XML
parsing library. A new parser can be written by subclassing from
vtkXMLParser and providing a few simple virtual method implementations. 

+ TIFF reader is now implemented using libtiff, which makes it capable
of reading almost all available TIFF formats. The libtiff is also
available internally as vtktiff. 

+ New method (all sub-classes of vtkObject): Added a virtual function
called NewInstance to vtkTypeMacro. NewInstance creates and returns an
object of the same type as the current one. It does not copy any
properties. The returned pointer is of the same type as the pointer the
method was invoked with. This method should replace all the MakeObject
methods scattered through VTK. 

+ vtkSetObject macro is depricated for use inside the VTK. It is still a
valid construct in projects that use VTK. Instead use
vtkCxxSetObjectMacro which does the same thing. 

+ vtkPLOT3DReader have been improved. It now supports: 

 - multigrid (each block is one output)
 - ascii
 - fortran-style byte counts
 - little/big endian
 - i-blanking (partial)

+ A new vtkTextProperty class has been created, and duplicated text API
s have been obsoleted accordingly. Check the "Text properties in VTK
4.2" FAQ entry for a full description of the change:
http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/vtkfaq?req=all#6.14

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Martin, PhD

Kitware Inc.

518 371 3971 x101

469 Clifton Corporate Pkwy

Clifton Park NY 12065

 

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