tiresias schrieb:
> On closer inspection, it seems that Elefont's povray output uses a triangle
> mesh.
> 
> With Elefont's maximum curve subdivision setting, this looks OK for smaller
> rendered images, but even for TV screen sized images (720x480) you can see the
> joins in the facets around the extruded faces. For large format images I don't
> think this is good enough.
> 
> I seem to recall many years ago using Moray. Bezier curves "drawn" and extruded
> in Moray were output with extruded faces as "smooth_triangle" which gave lovely
> smooth faces with no seams at all because the triangles had surface normals at
> each apex.
> 
> Moray or other GUI front ends have probably come a long way over the years. Are
> there any that can import shapes from truetype or windows metafile (or any
> other vector based file), and export to POV as SMOOTH triangles where
> necessary?
> 
> 
> 


OK, this answer is probably a bit too late for your project, but I read 
your post just today when I googled for a way to make or import bevelled 
text in povray that looks good.

After I've tried some other programs I finally used Blender.
  ttf (True Type fonts)  files can be imported. (I think other vector 
based files can be imported too but I don't know how.) An instruction 
how to create text and edit with blender can be found here: 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Text

I then exported the blender file to 3ds and then converted the 3ds with 
Poseray to Pov.

The result looks very smooth even in high resolution images.

Regards,
Simone

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