The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.8 Beta 2
of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

CGAL version 4.8 Beta 2 is a public testing release. It should provide
a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before the
release of the final version of CGAL 4.8 later in March.

That is the second "beta" release for CGAL-4.8. The reason is that there
was important bugs in our CMake scripts for some use cases. See the details
on GitHub:

https://github.com/CGAL/cgal/issues?q=milestone%3A4.8-beta2+label%3A%22CMake+scripts%22

You can find the detailed description of all changes since CGAL-4.8-beta1
here on GitHub:

https://github.com/CGAL/cgal/issues?q=milestone%3A4.8-beta2

As a reminder, you can find below the major changes since CGAL 4.7:

General

• The support for Qt3 is dropped and all demos using it got removed.

Installation

• Starting with Visual C++ 2015 we no longer require Boost.Thread as we
  use the C++11 keyword thread_local and the C+11 class std::mutex.
• The same holds for g++ 4.8 or later when the C++11 standard is used.

2D Reconstruction and Simplification from Point Set (new package)

• This package implements a method to reconstruct and simplify 2D point
  sets. The input is a set of 2D points with mass attributes, possibly
  hampered by noise and outliers. The output is a set of line segments
  and isolated points which approximate the input points.

3D Mesh Generation

• Add support of 3D gray level images as input for the tetrahedral mesh
  generation.

Polygon Mesh Processing

• Add a new triangle-based isotropic remeshing algorithm for
  triangulated surface meshes.

Point Set Processing

• Add Concurrency_tag to the functions compute_average_spacing(),
  edge_aware_upsample_point_set(), jet_estimate_normals(),
  jet_smooth_point_set(), and pca_estimate_normals().

See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.