The 1.0.0 release went up today, so the pre-release program is officially over. In the process the translator got exposed to quite a few different IGES files, and learned to cope with them, so it was a success.

November 18th, 1998. HarmonyWare, Inc. is proud to announce the beginning of the pre-release program for its family of IGES translators.

At this point, all the basic components of the IGES/Nlib and IGES/TSLib translators are in place. There are still several outstanding issues we are looking at, but overall the translator does well on the test files we have. The purpose of this pre-release program is to give you a chance to work with the translators, and us a chance to find and correct problems in dealing with real world IGES data.

It is important to stress that this product is not ready to go to end users. IGES translators which have not seen extensive real world data invariably break when exposed to it. While we are extremely pleased with the power that Nlib and TSLib give to our translators, it would be foolish to assume ours were any different than the norm. There will invariably be mistakes we have made and problems we have not foreseen.

Still, if you can be patient, this release could be very useful to you internally. The translators do get about 98% coverage on the trimmed surfaces we have for testing. And our goal is to turn around reported bugs very quickly. If you have a file you need to be able to load, we will go the extra mile to get it in for you.

The pre-release is available on a limited-duration, internal use only, source code and maintenance license. The license is scheduled to end on February 28th, 1999, but will be extended if the full release is not ready at that point. The price of the pre-release goes towards the purchase of the full release, when available.

Major Features:
• Resistant to faults in the physical format of the IGES file. [All]
• Reads most IGES geometry entities. (Check out the full list.) [All]
• Imports and exports points, curves, surfaces, and trimmed surfaces. [All]
• Sophisticated geometry cleaning. [IGES/TSLib, IGES/SMLib]

Major Shortcomings:
• The simple user interfaces are the only portion documented thus far. Detailed documentation on the inner workings will be made available as it is written. [All]
• Not nearly as efficient as it could be. [All]
• IGES component/group/assembly information is not conveniently available. [All]
• Ruled surfaces can be created to NURBS only if they are form 1 with both lines non-rational NURBS or linear curves. [All]
• Error handling is still crude. [All]
• Limited testing so far. [All]
• Trimmed surfaces of revolution require model space trimming curves. [IGES/TSLib, IGES/SMLib]

Because these translators are a work in progress, changes are being made all the time. The official list is logged here.

If you are interested in participating in the pre-release program, please contact: