- New NXfield properties have been defined for HDF5 parameters, including compression, chunk sizes, fill values, and maximum shapes. These can be set at any time before the data is saved to an HDF5 file or before slabs are stored in core memory files (for large datasets that are filled as slabs after creation).
- Fixes a bug in Python 3 when storing lists of strings. These were converted to Numpy arrays of kind 'U', which h5py was unable to convert. Now, they are automatically converted to Numpy arrays of variable-length strings, using the special h5py object datatype. If fixed-length strings are required, a dtype of 'S' (or 'Sn' where `n` is the required length) should be used when creating the NXfield.
- Provides better parsing of input parameters when creating an NXfield, _e.g._, the `maxshape` attribute is checked to ensure it is compatible with the NXfield shape.