** SoftSoft Ltd is proud to announce the release of WinTopo Pro 2.3 **

This new version of WinTopo Pro contains a lot of new development work and
ease-of-use features. A summary of the enhancements is listed below.

The good news for existing licensed users is that the upgrade is provided
free-of-charge.

The upgrade can be downloaded from the following web page...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/softsoft/wintopo/dl-wintopo-pro.htm

Please note that the activation license code for WinTopo Pro 2.3 is
different to one for the previous version of WinTopo Pro. Therefore after
upgrading you will need to get a new License code from us. Just send us an
e-mail with your "User Name" and the new "Serial Number". These will be
shown on the licensing window from the "File->License WinTopo Pro..." menu
option.
Send your e-mail to wintopo-upgrade@..., or the usual support
e-mail address. Do NOT send it to the User Group by replying to this
message!


~~ Here is a summary of the Enhancements in WinTopo Pro 2.3 ~~

A Preview Image is shown on the vector options window. This is a small
extract of your raster image and shows exactly how the various vectorisation
options will affect your vector result. The preview image can be magnified
and scrolled to show any part of your main image. This is extremely useful
for selecting the best options for your image.

All the various One-Touch Vectorisation options are on a single tabbed
window, instead of separate options windows. There is now only one Options
button on the toolbar. This makes it easier to set up the best options for
your type of image.

A Preview Image is shown for most of the image processing options on the
Image menu/toolbar. As you change the option setting in the window the
preview instantly shows the effect on your image. This makes it very simple
to choose the correct setting for the processing option. A preview is shown
for Despeckle, Fill Holes, Prune, Heal, Erode, and Advanced Edge Detection.

Undo is now available for nearly all of the image processing functions. You
can use the Undo toolbar button or the Edit->Undo menu option. In this
version of WinTopo Pro the image options are restricted to 1 level of Undo.

WinTopo Pro incorporates a new raster display engine which is able to handle
very large images, greater than 32000 pixels wide or high. Additionally,
large images are no longer limited in magnification ability. All images can
be magnified up to 32 times, regardless of size. This works best with
Windows NT/2000/XP, as Windows 95/98/ME will always have difficulty with
images bigger than 32000 pixels wide or high because it is not a proper 32
bit operating system.

A new image processing feature called Advanced Edge Detection. This finds
edges of solid shapes without affecting the line features on the image. This
is very useful for hollowing out drawings which have a mixture of lines and
solid shapes.

WinTopo Pro produces a tidier vector result by automatically eliminating
very short polylines (produced from image dirt), and undesirable vectors
which were formed between close/touching parallel lines in the previous
version.

Georeference information is automatically extracted from GeoTiff files, and
is propagated to the coordinates of the output vector drawing. Similarly
georeference information is automatically extracted from .tfw world files
that accompany Tiff files.

The default drawing origin (0,0 coordinate) is now at the bottom left of the
output vector drawing, instead of the top left.

There is a new Erode image processing option. This can be used to smooth
line edges, or just reduce the thickness of image features.

The Vectorise Options window has a new option to choose between either Break
lines at intersections (like the WinTopo Freeware method), or Continue
across intersections (like the previous WinTopo Pro method).

There is a new Image Processing Toolbar on the left side of the WinTopo Pro
main window. This contains the same options which are on the Image menu. All
toolbars are now the modern flat style.

There are new command line and batch processing options: -scale for setting
the scale of the vector output drawing; -acquire for invoking the TWAIN
scanner interface; -nosplash for suppressing the WinTopo image at start up.

The batch processing destination folder can be specified, instead of
defaulting to the same folder as the source raster image. This is useful for
batching CDROMs which cannot be used as the destination.

Tiff files saved from WinTopo Pro are now much smaller in size for black and
white images. It now uses the CCITT G4 compression instead of the Packbits
compression.

WinTopo Pro will now open even more of the unusual variants of Tiff files
(which many commercial image packages will not open).

~~ End of Enhancement Summary ~~

Best regards from the WinTopo Team at SoftSoft Ltd