Developer Reference V1.9 Release Notes

Faster Chart Installlation

We've improve our chart installation by caching some information the first time an ENC chart cell is installed. This allows subsequent updates to that cell to happen a lot more quickly. We work really hard optimising the chart geometry for display at install time. Typically, most of the geometry doesn't change when a chart update is issued so now we only do the optimisation once. There are other performance improvements in chart installation as well and the best thing is that you don't need to do anything to benefit! Just use the ManageENC.exe included with the release.

ENC install logging has also been improved.

ENC Display Decluttering

We have exposed some non-standard display improvements that we think really make charts look better and make it more readable over a range of zooms. The EncView1 sample has a check box to toggle this on and off if you'd like to take a look. Detail here.

Other API improvements

S57DisplaySettings.FontScaleFactor property allows you to change the font scaling factor. This was previously only changeable using an obscure registry value. Basically you need it to be 1.0 if you are writing an ECDIS which results in the text being a little too large as per ISO61174. For everyone else a value somewhere around 0.7 is probably preferable.

Better documentation of the S57DisplaySettings.Date property.

Better documentation of the S57Draw.CalculateNewDisplayScale method.

ManageTIFF

We have added ManageTIFF which can install GeoTIFF as raster charts into a raster chart folder. This is something we've had for ages but have not put into ENCX before. It's a capability that one of our customers requested. Putting it into the install properly allows other people to use it.

Some Fixes

Buoys and other periodic features that, for example, turn on in November and off in March were not drawn. NOAA are increasing using periodic features (those with PERSTA and PEREND attributes). This problem affected 15 NOAA cells.

ENC drawing fix when drawing ENC cells very zoomed out. When viewing ENCs at a scale that is very zoomed out (extremely different from their compilation scale) we switch to displaying only "skin of earth" features. However when there was a group of cells in the display being drawn as only skin of earth our algorithm could stop the drawing of one of the cells. Fixed with a better algorithm. This is not an issue for marine navigation as the charts were too zoomed out to navigate on but was a strange effect. Only easy to see with a sparse portfolio of charts in an area.

S57Manager.RunInstallApplication failed to pass the SENC path to ManageENC properly. Fixed.