Hello, The current proposal for the new LAS 1.4 specification breaks away in compatibility from the LAS 1.0 – LAS 1.3 family. In an open letter [1] I explain why this is a terrible idea. I also show how easy it would be to fix the current proposal. So far the ASPRS committee has ignored these concerns that are shared among a number of reputed LAS developers. What can you do? Contact the ASPRS LAS committee [2,3], ask for a copy of the proposed specification, and join a discussion [4] in an open forum (maybe not on this list (-:).
[1] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/download/open_letter_broken_LAS_1_4_specification.pdf [2] http://www.asprs.org/a/society/committees/standards/lidar_exchange_format.html [3] http://groups.google.com/group/ASPRS-LAS/members [4] https://lidarbb.cr.usgs.gov/index.php?showtopic=13592 Some more detail: The proposed LAS 1.4 specification is not backwards compatible and also breaks the forward compatibility of the LAS 1.X family that, for example, had allowed a LAS 1.1 reader to read a LAS 1.3 file that contains only points of type 0 or 1. Furthermore, it - for the first time - will require a LAS programmers to implement at least two different LAS specifications if they want their software to read and write LAS content other than LAS 1.4. Fixing this broken LAS 1.4 specification requires nothing more than to rearrange a few count and offset fields in the LAS header as detailed in the open letter [1]. Regards, Martin @lastools
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