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