On 10.09.2025 13:27, Bald Eagle wrote:
> 
> It's another installment in the long-running desire to have native stl support
> for POV-Ray.  There was some insistence that .stl is a binary-only format, or
> that it would be difficult to adapt our mesh {} code to handle stl.

STL may exist in binary form (although I see no good reason for that. 
Ok, some people say binary file takes less resources to load but I doubt 
it - I suppose most resources would be taken by interpreted scene 
itself, not the file), but ASCII STLs are fully legal. Like I said, 
beside POV-Ray output, for my img2mesh

https://dnyarri.github.io/img2mesh.html

I wrote ASCII STL, OBJ and DXF exports as well, and, imho, DXF is worst 
of all of them. It seems like developers were simply adding stuff like 
"ok let's plug this in ok so what type the variables are ah hell with 
that". What as to STL, about the only problem seem to be that some 
things declared as necessary are actually redundant and not used by 
various software, and it's hard to predict other software opinion about 
that. Well, with binary STL there would be problem with debugging 
(text-based formats are obviously the best for that), but since data are 
supposed to be the same as for ASCII, and STL allow only quite limited 
subset of what POV-Ray may do, I don't think it's an existential problem.

-- 
Ilyich the Toad
https://dnyarri.github.io/

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