PROJ 4.8.0 Released

Folks,

I am pleased to announce the release of PROJ 4.8.0.  This is a major new feature release and collects all the work done since the PROJ 4.7.0 release in September 2009.  The NEWS file includes these major items:

* Added the Natural Earth projection.
* Added HEALPIX, rHEALPIX and Icosahedral Snyder Equal Area projections.
* nad2bin now produces "CTable2" format grid shift files by default which  are platform independent.
* nad2nad removed, use cs2cs for datum shift operations.
* projects.h no longer installed as a public include file.  Please try to only use proj_api.h.
* Add pj_get_spheroid_defn() accessor.
* Added an alternate version of pj_init() that takes a projCtx (execution   context) structure to address multithreading issues with error management and to provide a support for application hookable error reporting and logging.
* Upgrade to EPSG 7.9.  Some changes in ideal datum selection.
* JNI bindings reworked, org.proj4.Projections deprecated in favor of org.proj4.PJ.
* Added preliminary vertical datum support.
* Fix various multithreading issues, particular in datum grid handling code.
* Added support for the +axis= option for alternate axis orientations as part of a coordinate system (used for TM South Orientated support).
* +proj=omerc implementatioin replaced with code from libproj4.  +rot_conv flag no longer works, and some coordinate systems (ie. Malaysian) will  need to use +gamma instead.  "epsg" init file updated accordingly.

More detailed information on work can be found in the ChangeLog file at:

 http://svn.osgeo.org/metacrs/proj/tags/4.8.0/proj/ChangeLog

The source code can be found at:

 http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.8.0.tar.gz
 http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.8.0.zip