File compression

Coin can support reading and writing Inventor and VRML files compressed with either gzip or bzip2 (as of yet - more formats may come in the future). This functionality is of course only enabled when Coin can link with the corresponding compression libraries.

Reading of compressed files happens in a transparent manner - there is nothing the developer has to do to support this.

Writing of compressed files is controlled through the SoOutput::setCompression method.

The list of available compression methods can be fetched with the SoOutput::getAvailableCompressionMethods method.

You cannot use file compression together with I/O to memory buffers, except for reading from memory buffers containing gzip-compressed files.

For backwards compatibility with Coin 2.0 and Coin 1.0, compressed files must not be used. Compressed files works only from Coin 2.1 and upwards.

Since
  Coin 2.1

See also
  SoOutput::setCompression, SoOutput::getAvailableCompressionMethods