RELEASE NOTES 

		spatstat 1.15-1

		31 March 2009
	
OVERVIEW
	Performance improvements in discretising windows
	and handling line segments.
	Extension to K function for bootstrap purposes.
	Spherical contact distribution implemented for geometric objects.
	New dataset. Bug fixes.

NEW FUNCTIONS

	Hest
		Spherical contact distribution of a random set
		(accepts objects of class ppp, psp and owin).

NEW DATASETS

	heather
		Diggle's heather data.

IMPROVEMENTS/ENHANCEMENTS

	Kest, Lest
		New argument 'domain' restricts the calculation 
		to a subset of the window. This is useful for
		bootstrap calculations.

	as.im.owin
		New argument 'value=1' determines the pixel values
		inside the window.

	as.mask
		The argument 'xy' can now be an image or a mask.

	demo(spatstat)
		This demonstration has been expanded.

	psp
	as.psp
	spatstat.options
		The function 'spatstat.options' has a new option
		'checksegments' which can be used to suppress
		checking of the geometric validity of line segment data
		by as.psp() and psp().
		This can save time if you are converting a large shapefile.
		

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

	as.mask
		The conversion of polygons into binary pixel masks
		is now 20 times faster. Up to 5 megapixels resolution
		can be handled at reasonable speed.

	as.psp.SpatialLines
	superimposePSP
		These functions now run 8 to 10 times faster.

	as.im.tess
		The conversion of a polygonal tessellation to a pixel image
		is now much faster.

	as.rectangle
		Slightly accelerated.

BUGS

	[1] localK, localL
		In the return value of localK() or localL(),
		the column names were not always unique.
		Fixed.

	[2] as.im
		as.im.im sometimes converted a factor-valued image
		to an integer-valued image.
		Fixed.