In article <369e286b.0@news.povray.org> , par### [at] my-dejanewscom (Ron Parker)
wrote:

>I thought 
>the Mac UI had a more advanced way to specify these options anyway, so why 
>is it a big deal in the first place?

Well, there is no *clean* way to pass options to POV-Ray except through the command
line in some way when using altmain. What we do is rather simple: All options are
taken from the dialog, then stored in a resource which is (Mac-like) in the resource
fork of the file (the data fork contains the text file part). When building the
command line we use this resource's data and allocate a string with the proper
argument. After altmain we free this memory. The (currently) only other way would be
to directly manipulate "internal" data structures.

The way we use is to check if a filename etc. uses with characters the core code
cannot handle. Then we warn the user.

>If the Mac UI does allow you to specify 
>a command line, it seems like it's the UI's job to parse it into a format 
>that's acceptable to altmain.

No it does not offer a command line, but it offers full INI file support of course...

>Unfortunately, I don't have the source code handy at the moment, so I can't
>say for sure whether any of these assertions are grounded in fact, but I'm
>sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong. :)

I think (I am not sure) that the command line parser will even take several arguments
in one string, so the UI does not need to split it.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom
e-mail: fro### [at] charliecnsiitedu

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://www.povray.org

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