Hi, Folks. I am pleased to announce the availability of JasPer version 1.700.x. Numerous changes have been made to the software since the 1.600.0 release. A few of the highlights are listed below. This list is in no particular order, and is not intended to be exhaustive. 1) The JasPer license has been revised in order to make it truly open source in nature. The new license is based on the popular MIT license. This change was made in order to address the needs of projects that can only use truly open-source software. 2) A preliminary attempt at a color management subsystem has been added to JasPer. This will allow for more accurate color reproduction when transcoding or rendering image data. Some of the underlying color management functionality makes use of the ICC color profile file format. Consequently, support for handling this file format is now present in JasPer. This support intelligently handles shared tags via reference counting. (Thanks to Scott Houchin for providing some ICC profiles for use in JasPer, and for answering a number of questions about the ICC color profile file format.) Some sample ICC profiles have been included with the JasPer distribution. 3) Previously, the configure process did not generate a configuration header file. Instead, all of the configure-related preprocessor defines were hardwired into the makefiles. Unfortunately, this approach has the strong potential to cause problems when non-JasPer application programs are built against the JasPer library (since such application programs will often fail to specify the correct configure-related preprocessor defines for JasPer). In order to resolve this problem, the configure-related preprocessor defines are now saved in a configuration header file (which is always included by application programs). 4) Temporary files created with the jas_stream_tmpfile function were not correctly removed upon file close under Microsoft Windows. Apparently, the Microsoft Windows operating system will not allow a file to be unlinked when it is open. The problem has been solved by deferring the unlink operation until the time of file close. (Thank you to Rick Bryan for pointing out this bug and providing a suggested fix.) 5) An option has been added to the JPEG encoder to allow a quality factor to be specified. (Thanks to Jason Fritts for providing a suggested patch which I adopted with a few minor modifications.) 6) A new make target has been added for RPM building. This functionality is experimental, and not officially supported. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited by law. Batteries not included. :) (Thanks to Alexander Karaivanov for providing the necessary changes.) 7) The code now compiles with many fewer warnings on most platforms. Previously, some unresolved type issues and missing type casts caused numerous warnings to be generated by most compilers. Also, some prototypes were missing or broken. The majority of these problems have been fixed (either by using consistent types or adding type casts). The source files jpc_enc.c and jpc_t1enc.c still need to be fixed, however. Hopefully, this will happen in the next release. 8) The JasPer software license has been made slightly less restrictive. Now, JasPer can be used without the JPEG-2000 support included. This had always been the intention of the JasPer Contributors, but the original wording failed to make clear that such use is legal. Also, the software may now be used for mission critical systems, provided that the user accepts all liability for the use of the software. 9) The configure-based build process has been updated to use newer versions of the GNU configure tools. The new JasPer release is available from the JasPer Project Home Page (i.e., http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper) and the JPEG web site (i.e., http://www.jpeg.org/software). Regards, Michael --- Michael Adams, Assistant Professor Dept. of Elec. and Comp. Engineering, University of Victoria P.O. Box 3055 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P6, CANADA E-mail: mdadams@ece.uvic.ca, Web: www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams