[Gmsh] newbie looking for feedback on using Gmsh as a ~ library to do pointcloud-->mesh & return results

[Bill Christens-Barry]

Hello.

I'm brand new with Gmsh, and hope to get comments on whether I can 
accomplish what I'd like to do using it.

What I have are pointcloud data, i.e. a list of (x, y, z) coordinates 
obtained using a laser scanner. What I want to do is use Gmsh more or 
less as a library to create a triangle mesh and calculate areas of the 
triangles constituting the mesh. Ideally, my program would pass the 
pointcloud data to Gmsh, which would return the mesh information and 
calculated area to the calling program. I may decide to do the area 
calculation in my program (Java or C).

I could go on with more details and other more complicated things I'd 
like to do, but am eager to get started doing the simpler things. Can 
anyone comment on feasibility or give me pointers to tutorials or other 
introductory material or examples that will get me going with Gmsh? Does 
what I've described require any special/optional libraries or other 
components to be installed, or would this need just a vanilla 
installation? My preference is to do this on an Intel Mac, but will 
eventually need to also do these things in Windows XP.

Thanks.

Bill Christens-Barry