NTXShape - NTX to Shapefile Converter / News: Recent posts

As per the previous notice, the beta has ended, and 1.4a is now released. The beta did not generate much feedback, so it is possible that there are bugs in there that have not been caught, due to a lack of testers. At any rate, I tested it pretty thoroughly myself, and it works for me.

The beta will be withdrawn May 30. If no bugs are reported by that time, 1.4a "final" will be released that weekend. If there are outstanding bugs, I will of course try to fix them first.

1.4a beta is released. It includes an updated GUI for ArcGIS, new 3D Line support, and also has some changes to the command line processing (e.g. removal of some obsolete options). Please report any errors through the bug tracker, and feel free to ask questions on the forums.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=52747&release_id=158473

Support for a new output type, LINEZ, is checked in to CVS. The LINEZ output option enables lines to be coverted as 3D shapes so that the per-vertex elevations are preserved.

A sample of an ArcGIS user interface for NTXShape, based on the Visual Basic bindings, is now published on the project page. This is found in the NTXShape UI package.

The release notes are at http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=52747&release_id=129091.

See also http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntxshape/

There was an erroneous example in the user manual, with "|" separating multiple patterns in the documentation for the "fcode pattern" option. This "|" feature was not implemented in 1.4 although it is now in the head-revision in CVS and will probably be in an upcoming 1.4a release.

Meanwhile an updated copy of the user manual is now included on the home page. This documentation supercedes that included in the 1.4 release.

A new setup wizard is released. New installations of NTXShape 1.4 should use ntxshape-1.4-setup-2.exe. For those who installed from ntxshape-1.4-setup.exe, there is no need to upgrade. Please see the release notes for more information.

As they say, "Stick a fork in it. It's done."

The Win32 install wizard seems to work correctly on a variety of platforms. The converter itself was already thoroughly tested, and seems not to have suffered from the migration to a new compiler / build system.

The Solaris and Linux versions produce binary-identical shapefiles, and the Win32 version has no relevant differences (only differences are in the least significant digits of real numbers).... read more

The changes required to support Solaris on Sparc have been checked in. Sparc has a different byte order and is more sensitive to misaligned floating point values. However, NTXShape now compiles in gcc 3.1 (with a few warnings) and runs, producing results identical to the Linux version.

With very few changes, the command line utility compiles on Linux, and produces shapefiles that are identical to the ones produced in Win32.

NTXShape 1.4 RC3 is now ready for download and testing.

The source code for NTXShape is now available in CVS. Some cleansing / reformatting and a few code changes were required before I could do this. I also updated the source code to compile with mingw/GCC. (The compiler that I had been using up to this point was not ANSI compliant at all, so it didn't lend itself to code sharing.)

NTXShape compiles cleanly in the new environment and seems to produce correct results when run, but it warrants *thorough* testing.... read more