xref: /potrace-1.14/NEWS (revision b3fce824)
1February 19, 2017: Release 1.14
2
3 This release consists of bugfixes and minor portability improvements.
4 A number of bugs triggered by malformed BMP files have been fixed,
5 including CVE-2016-8685 and CVE-2016-8686. Error reporting has been
6 improved. The image size is now truncated when the bitmap data ends
7 prematurely. It is now possible to use negative dy in bitmap
8 data. Portability has been improved to encompass C++11. The default
9 compiler is now clang if available. Thanks to Nelson Beebe and Martin
10 Gieseking for reporting portability issues, and to Agostino Sarubbo
11 for reporting bugs.
12
13October 22, 2015: Release 1.13
14
15 Some critical bugs in the processing of BMP files were fixed. These
16 bugs allowed the program to be crashed, or potentially to be abused
17 in other ways, by feeding it specially crafted BMP files. Thanks to
18 Tomasz Buchert and Agostino Sarubbo for reporting these bugs.
19 Portability was improved for C99 and for MSVC++. Thanks to Peter
20 Breitenlohner, Nelson Beebe, and Martin Gieseking for reporting
21 portability issues.
22
23March 24, 2015: Release 1.12
24
25 Fixed memory overflow bug triggered by very large bitmaps. Fixed
26 binary file mode on 64-bit Windows. Portability improvements.
27
28February 19, 2013: Release 1.11
29
30 A GeoJSON backend was added; thanks to Christoph Hormann for
31 contributing this. Support for bitfields in the BMP format was
32 added. A minor change was made to the behavior of the alphamax
33 parameter; a value of 0 now gives a true polygon.
34
35August 19, 2011: Release 1.10
36
37 A DXF backend was added. The output is in the drawing interchange
38 format used by computer aided design software. Thanks to Jonas
39 Benedett Dorr for testing. The Gimppath backend was changed to be
40 compatible with current versions of Gimp. The EPS, PDF, and SVG
41 backends now use high-resolution bounding boxes. The default scaling
42 of the EPS, PDF, and SVG backends is now fixed at 72dpi. A new option
43 --flat was added to the SVG backend. A new option --tight was added
44 to remove whitespace around the input image before calculating its
45 scaling and placement.
46
47December 21, 2010: Release 1.9
48
49 The xfig and eps backends were improved, and a fixed pagesize PDF
50 backend was added. Support for BMP version 4 and version 5 files, as
51 well as top-down BMP files, was added. Minor speed improvements to
52 Potrace and major speed improvements to mkbitmap. A Gaussian blur
53 option was added to mkbitmap. Libtool is now used to build and
54 optionally install the Potrace library. An optional simplified
55 progress bar was added for dumb terminals. This release also contains
56 some portability improvements, cross-compilation improvements, and
57 minor bug fixes.
58
59April 9, 2007: Release 1.8
60
61 This release contains minor bugfixes and portability improvements.
62 Rotation is now implemented in the PDF backend.
63
64March 6, 2005: Release 1.7
65
66 This is a bugfix release. A bug in the progress bar code, which
67 caused arithmetic exceptions on some 64-bit architectures, has been
68 fixed.
69
70February 27, 2005: Release 1.6
71
72 This release contains an algorithm improvement that leads to a
73 speedup of 20-60% over previous versions of Potrace. A new PDF
74 backend was added, courtesy of Tor Andersson. An option --progress
75 was added for displaying a progress bar. The Windows version of
76 Potrace now uses MinGW instead of Cygwin, eliminating the need to
77 install a special DLL alongside the executable programs, and solving
78 some problems with wildcards and executable PostScript files. Some
79 spurious "premature end of file" messages were eliminated. The
80 core functionality of Potrace was separated into a library with a
81 documented API, making it easier for developers to incorporate
82 Potrace into other GPL-licensed software.
83
84July 8, 2004: Release 1.5
85
86 The LZW patent has finally expired in Canada. Therefore, postscript
87 level 2 compression can now be implemented directly within Potrace,
88 without having to rely on the external "compress" program. This
89 release makes the necessary corrections.
90
91March 6, 2004: Release 1.4
92
93 This is a bugfix release. Fixed the bug which sometimes caused
94 Potrace to "hang" on large input files. Also fixed some bugs in the
95 compression code. The presence of the "compress" program is now
96 determined at run-time, rather than compile-time. No new features or
97 command line options were added.
98
99January 15, 2004: Release 1.3
100
101 This is primarily a bugfix release. Version 1.2 fatally crashed when
102 applied to an empty (all white) bitmap. The options -2 and -3 are now
103 ignored when unsupported, rather than causing an error.  There were
104 some improvements to the test suite, autoconfiguration, and
105 portability. The bounding box in the xfig backend was fixed, and the
106 postscript output now has better page encapsulation. Bitmaps of
107 dimension 0 are now tolerated better.
108
109December 23, 2003: Release 1.2
110
111 New experimental Gimppath and XFig backends were added.  A separate
112 program mkbitmap was added, which can be used as a preprocessor to
113 Potrace. It turns greyscale or color images into high-quality
114 bitmaps with optional scaling and filtering. New options --opaque,
115 --group, and --fillcolor were added for greater flexibility in
116 generating editable PostScript and SVG output. The bitmap
117 decomposition algorithm was improved and can now take advantage of
118 64-bit platforms.  Portability and autoconfiguration were vastly
119 improved, and a test suite was added. Runlength encoded BMP files can
120 now be read. Some bugs in command line options were fixed.
121
122August 18, 2003: Release 1.1
123
124 The most important new feature of this release is an SVG (scalable
125 vector graphics) backend. This file format can be read by vector
126 graphics manipulation programs such as sodipodi, as well as web
127 browsers with an SVG plugin. I also added PGM, PPM, and BMP as
128 additional input file formats. The new --blacklevel and --invert
129 options control how non-black-and-white images are converted to
130 bitmaps before being processed by Potrace. The implementation of a
131 critical function has been improved to make Potrace even faster on
132 large input files; this results in speedups of up to factor 3.3
133 relative to Potrace 1.0. Autoconfiguration was improved, and the code
134 was polished to compile on more different architectures. The error
135 messages for wrong file formats were also improved.
136
137August 10, 2003: Release 1.0
138
139 First public release.
140