libE57Format is a C library which provides read & write support for the ASTM-standard E57 file format on Linux, macOS, and Windows. E57 files store 3D point cloud data (produced by 3D imaging systems such as laser scanners), attributes associated with 3D point data (color & intensity), and 2D images (photos taken using a 3D imaging system).

The doxygen-generated documentation may be found here. These docs are generated and saved in the libE57Format-docs repo.

If you are using this library in commercial software, please contribute to the project.

Of course the open source license allows you to just take and not give anything back. It is perfectly Legal, but it is not Right and it's not good for the project.

Over the many years I've worked on this library, I have received precisely zero contributions (PRs, documentation updates, improved testing, financial support) from the many million/billion-dollar companies who use it in their software.

The more companies that leech on Open Source instead of nurturing it, the less healthy & viable the ecosystem is.

• a C 14 compatible compiler
• CMake >= 3.15
• clang-format for code formatting
• (optional) ccache to speed up rebuilds

• Xerces-C (for parsing XML)

$ sudo apt install libxerces-c-dev clang-format

$ brew install ccache clang-format xerces-c

Here's how you build & install a release version with the defaults:

$ cmake -B E57-build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=E57-install libE57Format
$ cmake --build E57-build --parallel
$ cmake --install E57-build

If CMake can't find the xerces-c library, you can set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to point at it.

$ cmake -B E57-build \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=E57-install \
    -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/xerces-c \
    libE57Format

Once the library is built, you can run the tests like this:

$ cd E57-build
$ ./test/testE57
[==========] Running 36 tests from 8 test suites.
[----------] Global test environment set-up.
[----------] 1 test from TestData
[ RUN      ] TestData.RepoExists
...

See test/README for details about testing and the test data.

This is a fork of E57RefImpl. The original source is from E57RefImpl 1.1.332.

The original code had not been touched in several years and I wanted to make changes to compile it on macOS. Forking it gave me more freedom to update the code and make changes as required. Everything was stripped out except the main implementation for reading & writing E57 files.

• I changed the name of the project so that it is not confused with the E57RefImpl project.
• I changed the main include file's name from E57Foundation.h to E57Format.h to make sure there is no inclusion confusion.
• Versions of libE57Format started at 2.0.
• I fixed it to compile and run on macOS.
• It no longer depends on Boost.
• It now requires C 14. (Version 2.x required C 11.)

Many, many other changes were made prior to the first release of this fork, and it has diverged significantly since. See the CHANGELOG and git history for details.

Jiri Hörner added the E57Simple API from the old reference implementation and updated it.

This Simple API has evolved since this original port to fix some problems and to make it more foolproof & easier to use. Please see the CHANGELOG for version 3.

• AliceVision
• CloudCompare
• MeshLab
• pye57

These projects use hard forks of libE57Format:

• FreeCAD
• PDAL

There are also many commercial products using libE57Format. If any of them would like to sponsor the project and be listed here, please contact Andy.

These are some of the things you can do to contribute to the project:

Given that I'm an independent developer without funding, financial support is appreciated. If you would like to support the project financially (especially if you sell a product which uses this library), you can use the sponsors page for one-off or recurring support, or we can arrange B2B invoicing of some kind. Thank you!

If you find the project useful, spread the word! Articles, mastodon posts, tweets, blog posts, instagram photos - whatever you're into. Please include a referral back to the repository page: https://github.com/asmaloney/libE57Format

If you found this project useful, please consider starring it! It helps me gauge how useful this project is.

If you run into something which doesn't work as expected, raising an issue with all the relevant information to reproduce it would be helpful.

I am happy to review any pull requests. Please keep them as short as possible. Each pull request should be atomic and only address one issue. This helps with the review process.

Note that I will not accept everything, but I welcome discussion. If you are proposing a big change, please raise it as an issue first for discussion.

This project uses clang-format to format the code. There is a cmake target (e57-clang-format) - which runs clang-format on the source files. After changes have been made, and before you submit your pull request, please run the following:

cmake --build . --target e57-clang-format

The documentation is a bit old and could use some lovin'. You can submit changes over in the libE57Format-docs repository.

This project is licensed under the BSL-1.0 license - see the LICENSE file for details.

Individual source files may contain the following tag instead of the full license text:

SPDX-License-Identifier: BSL-1.0

Using SPDX enables machine processing of license information based on the SPDX License Identifiers and makes it easier for developers to see at a glance which license they are dealing with.