news:40b73660@news.povray.org...

>   Both of these phenomena may be as bad as a squeezed image because they
> can potentially destroy the look of the image by introducing modelling
> artifacts (lack of proper modelling of the scene) or by leaving out
important
> details of the image.
>
>   Another problem is that the automatic control of aspect ratio can only
> be done by adding/removing extra image vertically. (Making image_width
> and image_height change the 'up' vector does not help: The elongation of
> the image is still done vertically.)

I still don't get it (and I've read the thread posted by Thorsten too).
Unless it's one single colour, a squeezed/stretched image is *** always ***
bad. There's zero point in rendering it, period. So, at its
worst, the automatic trick is the lesser of two evils. And in fact, from a
practical point of view, it's far from being such a problem. During scene
development, I usually cycle through my 4 favourite ratios (1.33, 0.75, 1
and 2.66) and the automatic trick makes it a breeze until I decide on what
ratio I'll finally use for the scene. Then, scene adjustments have to be
made to accommodate the ratio (zooming, moving/adding objects etc.), but
that's basically an artistic choice, as composition is deeply linked to the
aspect ratio.
Simply put, before the trick existed, I had the various ratios x*1.33, x*1
etc. in commented form, so all the drawbacks were already there, but it was
just a real pain as I kept forgetting to uncomment the right one... I'm not
saying that problems with automatic ratio don't exist, but I still have to
see people
complaining about them and I never considered them to be drawbacks at all,
let alone harmful.
However, we still have people puzzling about stretched/squeezed images due
to
the default 1.33.
Professional video output is more a real issue (though a niche one
IMHO) but for this the user could still have the choice of using a
non-square pixel ratio, as it's the case now.

G.

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