Put simply, a binary is any file that is not a plain text file. For our
newsgroup purposes, the following are examples of binary files:

- JPEGs, or other graphic file formats,

- HTML-encoded text (many people who follow our newsgroups use
  newsreaders that cannot automatically read HTML posts without
  launching an external Web browser. Please post plain text messages or,
  at least a combination of plain text and HTML),

- any executable file,

- any other file that is sent as an attachment to a posted message, even
    if it is readable text. This includes POV-Ray scene (.pov) files
    sent as message attachments.

For the sake of newsgroup organization we ask that you post binary
attachments to the appropriate groups, such as:

- images to "povray.binaries.images",

- animations to "povray.binaries.animations",

- program utilities to "povray.binaries.utilities", and

- any attached scene files, whether text or binaries, to
     "povray.binaries.scene.files".

Simple POV-Ray (.pov) scene files, text include files, and text macros
may be 'cut and pasted' into the body of your message and posted in the
group "povray.text.scene.files". Please be reasonable and don't paste a
10mb mesh include file into the body of a message :) If your scene
source needs to be this large then you might consider providing a .url
so that people may download it from a remote location.

If you post an image to a binary group and then decide to provide the
scene source (due to overwhelming demand), post the source in the
appropriate binary (for attachments) or text (when your source is typed
or pasted into the body of your message) group and make a reference to
your posted image in the subject line.

Please consider converting 24-bit bitmap images, such as targas and
Windows .bmp, to JPEG (.jpg) file format which uses a compression
algorithm to reduce the file size considerably. This conserves space on
the news.povray.org server for everyone.

Animations can be of various popular file formats such as Windows .avi,
.fli, MPEG, or Apple QuickTime, but one should consider that some
animation formats may not be viewable on all platforms and therefore may
not reach as wide of an audience. Again, using an available compression
scheme with your animation program will benefit all who use this server
by conserving disk space.

  Thank you all for your consideration and happy raytracing!
-- 
Alan
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