The changes are fully described at
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/Release/1.8.0-News
However, the following are the highlights.
In a nutshell:
* New GDAL drivers : GTX, HF2, JPEGLS, JP2OpenJPEG, JPIPKAK,
KMLSUPEROVERLAY, LOS/LAS, MG4Lidar, NTv2, OZI, PDF, RASDAMAN,
XYZ
* New OGR drivers : AeronavFAA, ArcObjects, GPSBabel, HTF, LIBKML,
MSSQLSpatial, NAS, OpenAir, PDS, PGDump, SOSI, SUA, WFS
* Significantly improved OGR drivers : DXF, GML
* New implemented RFCs:
o RFC 7: Use VSILFILE for VSI*L Functions
o RFC 24: Progressive data support in GDAL
o RFC 28: OGR SQL Generalized Expressions
o RFC 29: OGR Set Ignored Fields
o RFC 30: Unicode Filenames
o RFC 33: GTIFF - Corrected !PixelIsPoint Interpretation
* New utility : gdallocationinfo
Backward compatibility issues:
* MITAB driver: use "," for the OGR Feature Style id: parameter
delimiter, not "." as per the spec. Known impacted application:
MapServer?
* RFC 33 changes the way PixelIsPoint? is handled for GeoTIFF
* GML driver: write valid <gml:MultiGeometry> element instead of
the non-conformant <gml:GeometryCollection>. For backward
compatibility, recognize both syntax for the reading part
This release includes many great new features to make your QGIS experience
even better than ever before. This release also contains many bug fixes that
should improve stability over previous releases. See below for a list of the
more noticable changes made in this release.
(GIS) licensed under the GNU General Public License. QGIS is an official
project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It runs on Linux,
Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows and supports numerous vector, raster, and database
formats and functionalities.
Quantum GIS provides a continously growing number of capabilities provided by
core functions and plugins. You can visualize, manage, edit, analyse data, and
compose printable maps. Get a first impression with some screenshots and a more
detailed feature list.