In article <40b76476@news.povray.org> , "Gilles Tran" <tra### [at] inapginrafr>
wrote:

> Hmm, we have a failure to communicate here ;) This is about the unending
> flow of users who try to get a vertical, square or widescreen image and get
> a squeezed/stretched one because of the default 1.33 and then complain about
> it in newsgroups or to TAG members because they expect the width and height
> values to work right away (without requiring another parameter change), as
> they do in other renderers and 3D apps (at least all those I'm using). The
> automatic ratio trick is popular for a reason.

Making it automatic will not help.  Just because those who report never read
the documentation do not understand a feature does not imply at all it
should work differently.  There are a million things they won't understand
without reading it.  And it is very likely that changing it to behave the
other way there will be as many people asking the opposite question.
Consequently, we cannot make a program fool-proof, every time we try we just
create better fools or get other fools reporting the opposite behavior as
unexpected.

I bet many CD player manufacturers also got many reports in the early days
that CD did not work because people inserted them upside-down.  Today people
would probably face the opposite problem when dealing with an ancient
playback device.  Either way, one can only figure out the correct usage of
any complex device by reading the manual.  Bad luck if one doesn't...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message