POV-Ray for Windows version 3.7 | ||||
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The File Menu contains commands that, in general, relate to loading and saving files. Note: In the interest of brevity, we will not explain obvious file menu entries. We assume that all readers will understand Save, Save As, etc., as these are basic Windows knowledge issues. |
The File Menu |
This creates a new file in a new window in the internal editor. The language type will be set to 'none', so unless you change this from the editor properties, syntax highlighting will not occur until you do a Save As.
This creates a new window in the internal editor and opens the specified file in it. POV-Ray will attempt to set the language type according to the extension. .POV, .INC, .MAC and .MCR files are assumed to be POV-Ray files and will have POV syntax highlighting. If you use a different file extension for POV source code, you can set the language type manually after you open it.
Note that POVWIN will not let you load more than one copy of the same file. If you attempt to load an already-loaded file, that file will be selected as the current file in the editor, but nothing else will happen.
This closes the file open in the currently-selected internal editor.
This closes all files currently open in the internal editor.
Provides a dialog that allows selection of printing options for the currently selected editor file (does not work with the message window). You can even choose two-up printing (that is, printing two pages on a single sheet of paper by splitting it down the middle). Note that the printing will not reflect any colored syntax highlighting in the editor; printing is always done in monochrome.
This option lets you exit POV-Ray for Windows. If you have Save Settings on Exit selected, your current POV-Ray for Windows settings will be saved for your next session.
If you shut down your computer without exiting POV-Ray for Windows first, POV-Ray will load itself again next time you log in as the same user. Note that we do not recommend shutting down your computer without saving any edited files first - while the editor will attempt to do the right thing with unsaved files during a shutdown, to a great extent it is at the mercy of the operating system.
The MRU (most recently used) file list holds up to nine (9) files. The Older Files menu (see above) holds up to 32 additional files. After a file scrolls off the bottom of the MRU list it goes into the top of the Older Files menu.
When you select a file from the MRU list, if it is already open in the editor, it is selected and moved to the top of the MRU list. Otherwise, it is opened and moved to the top of the list. The MRU list remembers several things about files, including the last line, column, and top line number, plus the language and indent settings. The comments in this paragraph also apply to the Older Files menu.
After files have scrolled off the bottom of the MRU (Most Recently Used) list that appears at the bottom of the File Menu, they will appear in the Older Files menu. The MRU list holds up to nine (9) files, the Older Files menu holds up to 32 additional files. If there are no files in the Older Files menu (such as when POV-Ray is initially installed), it will be disabled.
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The Edit Menu contains commands relating to altering, cutting, copying, and pasting text. Note that there are actually two edit menus, though you only ever see one at a time. These are the edit menu that is displayed when the message window is selected, and the edit menu that is displayed when any of the editor windows are selected. The contents are different since the windows have different functions. |
The Edit Menu |
Note: The Message Window shortcut keys for Cut, Copy, etc. have been changed to the newer Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V style. The old shortcuts (Ctrl-Ins etc.) will still work, however, even though they're not shown in the menu.
The shortcut keys assigned when the Editor Windows are selected are set according to your preferences. See the Configuring the Internal Editor section for more information as to how to do this.
This command lets you copy all the text currently displayed in the POV-Ray window to the clipboard. From there you can paste it into any text file for modification with a text editor or word processor. This can be particularly useful for bug reporting. Note: This command only appears if the currently selected window is the Messages window.
Clears all messages in the Message Window. This command only appears if the currently selected window is the Messages window.
This command, and the remaining ones, only appear if the current window is an editor window.
The Undo command 'undoes' (reverses or remedies) the last change made to the text. Consecutive Undo operations can be used to revert to earlier and earlier text. The editor keeps seperate Undo and Redo histories for each open file.
Redoes the last change undone with Undo. Can only be used immediately following an Undo operation; editing the text will erase the Redo history. Consecutive Redo operations are possible if consecutive Undo operations were performed. The editor keeps seperate Undo and Redo histories for each open file.
Deletes the selected text and places it on the clipboard.
Places the selected text on the clipboard.
Inserts text from the clipboard, overwriting any selected text. If no text is selected, the pasted text is inserted at the current caret position, even if the editor is in overwrite mode.
Deletes the selected text.
Selects all text in the current window.
The Selection sub-menu contains commands which relate to operations on blocks of selected text. If there is no text selected in the editor, all of these commands will be disabled.
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The Selection sub-menu |
See Using the Mouse for a description of the various ways you can select text (including full line blocks, stream blocks, and column blocks).
Inserts a tab (or spaces, depending on your tab settings) at the beginning of the selection on each line. You must have multiple lines and/or a newline selected, or the selected text will be replaced by a tab instead.
Moves the caret to the position of the next text on the previous line.
Removes one level of indent from the beginning of the selected lines.
Converts all alphabetical characters in the selected text to uppercase.
Converts all alphabetical characters in the selected text to lowercase.
Converts sequences of space characters to tabs. (Note: The tab size can be set under the Text menu.)
Converts tabs to sequences of space characters. (Note: The editor does this automatically by default. This behavior can be turned off in the Language/Tabs section of the Editor Preferences.)
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The Search Menu, which is only displayed when an edit pane is active, contains commands related to searching for and replacing text. |
The Search Menu |
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Searches the file for the first occurrence of a specific string of text and highlights/selects it. |
The Find Dialog |
If this option is checked, partial matches will not occur (for example, the search string 'Persist' will not find the word 'Persistence', whereas normally it would).
If this option is checked, then the case of the search string and the searched-for text will be the same.
The search string allows the following wildcard characters if the "Wildcard Search" option is checked -
? | Matches any single character |
+ | Matches one or more of the previous character or item (which may be a wildcard
or group), up to a maximum of the end of the line. For example, ?+
will match from the next character to the end of the line, and [0-9.]+
will match any number, with or without a decimal point.
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* | This operator works like '+' above, but matches zero or more rather than one or more. Put another way, it makes the previous character or item optional. |
[] | Characters enclosed in square brackets will be treated as an inclusive set.
Character ranges may be specified with a '-' (e.g. [a-c] would match
the characters 'a', 'b', or 'c').
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| | Subexpressions may be ORed together with the | pipe symbol. |
() | A wildcard expression may be enclosed within parentheses and will be treated as a unit. |
Sequences such as \t, etc. will be substituted for an equivalent single character.
To represent a literal backslash, use two (e.g. \\ ).
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Be Aware: The wildcard search facility does have some bugs in it and may not always match
correctly (e.g. [0-9A-Za-z]
will match all alphanumerics, but [A-Za-z0-9]
does not match numbers, even though it should).
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Searches the file for any occurrences of a specific string of text and replaces them with a different string. Users of other programmer's editors should note that there is no means of back-referencing wildcard groups from the search expression during a replace operation. |
The Replace Dialog |
Finds the next occurrence of the string specified in the last Find operation.
Finds and highlights/selects the other brace for the block of code enclosed by the brace at the caret. For example, if you had the edit caret on a '{' character, it would be moved to the matching '}', taking into account the nesting of any '{}' blocks between them. Note that this also works in reverse.
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The Text Menu contains options and operations that act on text which is displayed in the editor. It is only displayed when an editor pane is chosen. |
The Text Menu |
Indicate where white space is using a dot. Note that this does not affect the file itself, just how it is shown on the screen.
Most editor commands can be automatically repeated a specified number of times. By setting the repeat count, you cause the next editor command you issue to be repeated that number of times (this includes caret positioning using the keyboard).
The Tab size setting only applies to the current file and any subsequently opened files. Changing the tab spacing for one file does not automatically change it for all the other files that are already open. The tab setting you choose is stored with the MRU list, so if you re-open a file from the MRU, the old setting comes back (for that file only).
Note that the new value you apply to the tab setting becomes the default for any file opened or created after that point (apart from those in the MRU list). So if you change the tab setting to, say, 3, the setting for the current file changes, but not that of any other open file. Any new file that you create or load from that point, however, will be created with a default tab spacing of 3.
See the Selection sub-menu.
No indentation occurs. The next line begins at column 1.
Language-specific scoping is used to determine the correct indentation level for the next line. This setting causes the editor to parse the buffer contents, looking backward for scope keywords until the start of the current scope is encountered. Once found, the indentation is copied to the next line. If no language is set, the editor acts as if 'Copy From Previous Line' was chosen.
Indentation is copied from the previous line.
Bookmarks provide a means to quickly get to a previously-marked position in a file. Any bookmarks you define are lost when POVWIN exits.
Delete all bookmarks.
Jump to the first bookmark.
Jump to the last bookmark.
Jump to the next bookmark.
Jump to the previous bookmark.
Toggle a bookmark on or off at the current line.
The Editor Menu contains commands that relate to the configuration and use of the editor. It is only displayed when an editor pane is selected.
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The Editor Menu |
If this option is checked, POVWIN will automatically load a file, in which a parse error has occurred, into the editor (or select it if it's already loaded), then place the cursor on the line and column of the offending code.
Note that if this option is on, and the message window was displayed automatically (see 'Auto-Show Parse Messages' below), it will be closed automatically rather than being left open. The text describing the error will be displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Note that, occasionally, if the error occurs inside a macro, the displayed line/column for the error will be wrong.
If this option is selected, when you start a render, a small version of the message window will be opened at the bottom of the edit window. You can resize this window vertically using the mouse. To close it, just hit ESCAPE.
Note that unless you have 'Auto-Load Error File' selected, the message window will remain visible upon a parse error (so that you can see it without switching windows). If the render completes successfully, the message window will close.
The delay, in minutes, between automatic saves of your work. If you set this to 0, no automatic saves will be made.
Be Aware: If Auto-Reload is set to either 'Ask' or 'Always', switching focus to another application will cause all of your files to be automatically saved.
If this option is checked, the editor will create a backup file named the same as the original but with '.bak' appended to it the first time the file is saved in each edit session. Note that it is not created with each save, but only the first!
Also note that appending the '.bak' extension is meant literally - unlike editors that hail from the old 8.3 filename era, which would remove the old extension and replace it with .bak (e.g. 'foo.pov' would become 'foo.bak'), we literally append '.bak', such that 'foo.pov' becomes 'foo.pov.bak', thus avoiding the problem that having two files named 'foo.pov' and 'foo.inc' in the same directory would have caused.
Unless this option is checked, manually saving a file clears the undo buffer. In this case, you will not be able to undo changes made before you saved a file.
This option, which is on by default, allows the editor caret to be positioned beyond the end of the line if you choose to left-click there with the mouse. This is the behavior that most users seem to want. However, a number of users have requested that the 'old' behavior (from the previous POVWIN editor, which did not allow the caret beyond the end of a line) be preserved. Note that this option is only available if 'Constrain Caret to Text' (see below) is not checked.
This option forces the edit caret to always remain within existing text (except when extending the end of the file). As with the 'Click Beyond EOL' option above, this is the behaviour that some users prefer and was the default in the POVWIN 3.0 editor. Note that selecting this option causes the 'Click Beyond EOL' menu entry to be disabled.
If 'Click Beyond EOL' is turned off, and you left-click beyond the end of a line, the editor caret will snap to the location after the last character on the line. You can still manually (using the cursor keys) move the caret right past the end of the line, or down onto a new line (and thus be past the end of that line, if it were shorter).
If 'Constrain Caret to Text' is turned on, it has the same effect as turning 'Click Beyond EOL' on, with the additional restriction that using the cursor keys will not move the caret into virtual space. For example, moving the caret right at the end of a line will cause it to wrap to the start of the next line instead of moving right into virtual space.
See the Keyword Expansion section.
Manually cause the small message window to be displayed (or hidden if it is showing, in which case this menu entry will read 'Hide Message Window' instead of 'Show Message Window'). Note that you can also use the Escape key to hide the message window.
See Auto-Show Parse Messages for more information.
See the Editor Preferences sub-section.
A keystroke macro (not to be confused with POV-Ray scene file macros) is a collection of editing actions (which may include cursor movement, text editing, search, replace, and so forth) which may be assigned to a shortcut key and stored for re-use. POV-Ray for Windows stores macros in the registry, so they will still be available next time you run the program. You can have up to ten keystroke macros recorded at any one time.
Once you activate the 'Record Macro' command, a small dialog box will appear that allows you to stop the recording, and then assign a key to the macro before it is saved. If you do not assign a key, the macro will still be playable via the 'Play Macro' menu.
The Auto-Reload facility (which by default is set to 'Ask') causes the editor to check the time and date of all files that are currently open when it receives focus from another application. For example, suppose you were using a program that automatically generates POV scene files (these are quite common) and had the output file open in POVWIN. If you switched to that application, told it to regenerate the output file, then switched back to POVWIN, the editor would detect that the file had been changed (assuming Auto-Reload is enabled).
The three settings available for Auto-Reload are 'Never', 'Ask', and 'Always'.
Be Aware: If Auto-Reload is set to either 'Ask' or 'Always', switching focus to another application will cause all of your files to be automatically saved.
Warning: The auto-reload feature is not intended as a substitute for common sense. We do not guarantee that it will work. It is not always possible to determine if a file has changed (for example, the time stamp may not be updated by the other application) and apart from that, it takes time to save a file. If the other application is still in the process of saving the file when you switch back to POVWIN, it's possible that the change won't be picked up. Likewise if POVWIN is still saving the file when the other application is selected; for example, if it is an editor with a similar feature, it may not pick up the change.
Nevertheless, Auto-Reload is a useful feature under most circumstances.
Select whether the edit window has horizontal scrollbars, vertical scrollbars, or both.
Note that if you turn off a scrollbar, you lose the ability to split the window in that direction (since the window splitter for each direction is on the scrollbar).
The colors used by POVWIN's editor are able to be customized by you on a case-by-case basis. However, for convenience, there are two built-in color schemes accessible from the Editor menu. These are 'Black on White' (the default) and 'White on Black'.
Black on White is the traditional Windows style of presentation, with black text being drawn on a white background.
White on Black is the other way around - a black background with white text. Many users who became accustomed to using text editors under DOS will be comfortable with this.
Note that choosing one of these options will overwrite any changes you had made to your color scheme ! Once you have chosen a new scheme, you may customize it from that point (or simply choose 'Custom' to be taken to the Color/Font dialog).
The following sections cover the available Editor Preferences.
This property page allows setting of various editor parameters relating to the color of the syntax highlighting, page background, and font. Changes made on this page affect all editor windows immediately and are stored in the registry for recall the next time POVWIN is run.
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The Color/Font tab |
This list box allows you to select which item you want to set the color for. An 'item' is any individually-controllable color within the editor. For example, plain text, bookmarks, the left border, comments, and so on are all individually controllable.
See also Color Scheme sub-menu.
This sets the foreground color of the item selected in the 'Item' listbox.
This sets the background color of the item selected in the 'Item' listbox. If it is set to 'default', then the background color will be the same as the window background.
This allows you to set the font face, size, and style that is used for displaying the text within the editor windows.
This property page allows you to manually specify the language that the current file uses. The editor normally will set this for you, but if you are editing a supported language in a file with an unrecognized extension, you may want to manually specify it.
You can also set the auto-indentation style in use and the tab settings.
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The Language/Tabs tab |
This allows you to select the auto-indentation style for the currently selected file. This style will then become the default for all newly-loaded files, but will not change the auto-indentation style for any already-loaded files. Note that the auto-indentation style selected for a file is saved in the registry, and is retained with the file in the MRU (most-recently-used) file list held in the File Menu.
You can select the number of columns tabs expand to here. Additionally, if 'Convert tabs to spaces while typing' is checked, pressing the TAB key will not insert a hard tab but will instead insert the apppropriate number of spaces.
We strongly recommend that you use the 'Convert tabs to spaces while typing' option if you intend to use the tab key in a file that you will distribute to other users. This is because different people have different preferences for tab indentation settings, and if a person receives a file from you with hard tabs embedded in it, and has a different setting for tab expansion, your code may not align properly. This can make it hard to read.
Changing the tab expansion setting affects the current file, and also becomes the default for any newly-loaded files. It does not affect the tab expansion settings for already-loaded files.
You can choose the file language here. This setting controls syntax highlighting and the indentation rules (if you have 'Follow Language Scoping' set for the Auto-indentation style).
The editor supports syntax highlighting for the following file types: POV-Ray, C/C++, Basic, Java, Pascal, SQL, HTML, and XML.
This property page allows you to set the key sequence assigned to all built-in editor commands.
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The Keyboard configuration tab |
Not all commands are assignable ! In general, only the commands that are directly implemented in the CodeMax editor DLL are able to be set. These commands are ones that relate to operations on individual edit buffers. They do not include such things as file operations (load, save, print, etc). These operations are implemented in the POVWIN editor wrapper code and are not managed or able to be changed by CodeMax. Therefore, it should be clear that you can neither change the key bindings for operations such as file save, nor use the POVWIN- assigned keystroke (e.g. Ctrl-S in the case of save) for any other purpose.
See the Default Key Mappings section for a list of all the default assignments of editor commands to keystrokes. Note that each command may have two different key sequences assigned to it, and that each key sequence may have up to two keystrokes (e.g. the old 'Wordstar'-style commands).
To assign a key to a command, choose the command you want in the listbox on the left, and then click in the box titled 'New Key Assignment' and press the key(s) you want to use, then press 'Assign' to set it.
Hint: It's very easy to just press 'OK' after typing in a new key assignment, without pressing 'Assign' first! If you do this, the new keystroke will not be assigned.
With the exception of 'Line Numbers', all the options on this property page affect all editors. All take effect immediately.
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The Miscellaneous Settings tab |
If checked, scrolling of the editor window will be 'smooth' rather than jerky. Some people prefer this, though it is slower than the traditional scrolling.
If checked, the left margin will be visible. The left margin is a useful area that can contain things such as line numbers and bookmark markers. It can also be colored differently from the main text. You can highlight an entire line by clicking in the left margin next to it, and highlight a range of lines by clicking and dragging in the margin.
See The Editor Window for an example of the appearance of the left margin.
If checked, and you scroll the edit window by dragging the scroll-bar thumb, a line tooltip will show the approximate line number you have scrolled to.
If checked, OLE drag and drop text editing is enabled. This allows you to highlight blocks of text and drag them to another position within the editor window, or even to another editor program that supports the same feature (e.g. the standard Windows 'wordpad' editor, Microsoft Word, and many others). Of course, you can also drag text from those applications and drop it into the editor window.
Mouse Action | Result |
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L-Button down over selection, and drag | Moves text |
Ctrl + L-Button down over selection, and drag | Copies text |
If checked, columns of text can be selected with the mouse and then manipulated. Empty columns (columns with a width of zero characters) can be selected, causing subsequent typing and deletion to occur over multiple lines at the same time.
See Using the Mouse for a description of how to select columnar blocks.
This is the same as the Constrain Caret To Text option in the Editor Menu. Please refer to that documentation.
If checked, color syntax highlighting will be used according to the Language setting. You can control the colors used from the Color/Font.
See The Editor Window for an example of the appearance of syntax highlighting.
These two options select whether the edit window has horizontal scrollbars, vertical scrollbars, or both.
Note that if you turn off a scrollbar, you lose the ability to split the window in that direction (since the window splitter for each direction is on the scrollbar). In this case, the appropriate 'Allow Splitting' option (see below) will be dimmed and unavailable.
These two options select whether or not you can split a window by dragging on the horizontal or vertical splitters (see The Editor Window for an example of what the splitters look like).
Using this method you can split the window into up to four different sections. Each section will still show the same file, but the sections can show different parts of the file. Editing in one section causes the changes to be immediately visible in any other sections that are showing the same part of the file.
This allows you to turn on line numbering, which may be in decimal, hex, octal or binary (!). Note that this setting does not influence whether or not line numbers are included in printouts you make of the file; if you want printed line numbers, you can select that option in the print dialog.
Note that, unlike the other settings on this property page, the Line Numbers setting only applies to the current editor file. Additionally, it is not preserved across invocations of the editor; once you exit, the setting is forgotten.
Allows you to set a limit on the number of edit actions that will be stored in the 'undo' buffer. Actions older than this limit will be discarded. Unless you are critically low on memory (or don't like having hundreds of undo's available), we recommend that you leave this on the default setting of 'infinite'.
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The Insert menu |
The Insert menu allows you to insert header sections, object definitions, etc. into a file you are editing with the internal editor, with only a few clicks of your mouse. It is only visible if you have selected an editor window.
This menu is built dynamically from the directory called 'Insert Menu', which is in the POV-Ray for Windows installation directory. The way it works is similar to the Windows 95/NT Start Menu. You can even edit it at run-time, and POVWIN will automatically pick up the fact that it's been changed and re-load it.
It has the additional special feature that menu entries may optionally have an image file associated with them, which is displayed when that entry is highlighted. A set of these image files is shipped with POV-Ray for Windows as standard; you can re-render these at a higher resolution if you like - see Re-Render Insert Menu Bitmaps in the Other Settings sub-menu menu.
Each sub-menu in the Insert Menu is a directory (also called a 'folder' these days). To create a new sub-menu, just create a new directory. The submenu will have the same name as the directory.
The actual items that you can insert in your scene files are simply text files. POVWIN recognizes them by the extension .TXT. Any .TXT file in the Insert Menu directory tree will appear in the Insert Menu. The name shown in the Insert Menu will be the filename of the .TXT file, minus the .TXT extension. If you select this file from the Insert Menu, the contents of the corresponding text file will be inserted into your scene file at the current cursor location.
It is possible to order the insert menu entries any way you like, both for folders and for the files (or sub-folders) within them. Normally, the entries are added to the menu in alphabetical order, with all folders being added before files. However, you can influence the ordering of each group (folders and files) by prepending a 'NN - ' to a folder or file, where 'NN' is any letter or digit (note however that this does not permit you to place a file before a folder).
For example, suppose you wanted to move the folder called 'Transformations
'
(which creates the menu entry called 'Transformations
' in the above sample
image) so that it appears between the 'Expressions
' and 'Headers
'
items in the menu. You could achieve this by re-naming the folder from 'Transformations
'
to, say, 'F0 - Transformations
' (the choice of 'F0
' in this
example is arbitrary - you could use anything that will alphabetically sort between
'Expressions
' and 'Headers
').
When the editor code builds the insert menu (which happens each time you change it), any file or folder that starts with a prefix of 'NN - ' (note the trailing space) will be sorted using the prefix, but displayed without the prefix.
Creating a special file called '-.txt
' (a hyphen followed by .txt
)
usually prefixed by a 'NN -
' (e.g. '30 - -.txt
'), will cause
a menu separator to be drawn instead of inserting a new item into the menu. The contents
of the file are ignored.
To create a separator between sub-menus, do the same thing as above, but create a folder instead
of a file and leave off the '.txt
' extension.
Each Insert Menu text file can have an associated BMP, JPG or PNG file that provides a preview of the item that the text file can generate. In the previous example image, the item provides the no_reflection
keyword, so the preview image shows a rendered example of this in use. The easiest way to understand how it all fits together is to inspect the Insert Menu directory that ships with POV-Ray for Windows. The first item in the Insert Menu will allow you to do that by opening an Explorer window located at that point on your disk.
See also Re-Render Insert Menu Bitmaps in the Other Settings sub-menu menu.
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The Render Menu contains options that relate to starting, stopping, and controlling the rendering process (i.e. the generation of images). |
The Render Menu |
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This command lets you select an INI and/or a POV file and make any last-minute command-line changes to the POV-Ray options before rendering. In the 'Ini file' box, you can select an INI file by typing in the filename. You can also browse your directory structure for it. POV-Ray for Windows remembers the last directory from which an INI file was actually selected. If you select an INI file that has sections (see Sections in Understanding File Types), the Section box shows the first section label. Clicking on the down arrow brings up a menu of other sections in the INI file for you to choose from. |
The Render Settings dialog |
In the 'Source file' box, you can select a POV file by typing in the filename. You can also browse your directory structure for it. Once again, the directory that shows up is the last directory from which a POV file was actually selected.
If you currently have an editor window selected, you will not be able to change these entries as they will be set to the name of the file you are editing (even if its extension is not .POV). If you want to use these fields you need to choose the Message window first.
The commands are processed from top to bottom. Any options in the INI file you select override the default POVRAY.INI file as well as any POVRAY.INI file in the directory where the scene file resides. A selected POV file overrides any 'Input_File_Name=' option in the selected INI file. Finally, any command-line options override corresponding options in any INI file. The command line is processed from left to right; if an option is repeated on the command line, the one last processed applies.
If you want to change the command-line settings but do not want to start rendering the currently loaded POV file, press 'Set but don't Render'.
The command line is versatile. If you have a POV file and a number of options loaded, you can override the scene to be rendered by typing the name of another POV file on the command line. Conversely, you can type in one or more options (or the name of an INI file), forcing POV-Ray for Windows to render the currently loaded POV scene with the new options. If you type the name of an INI file which specifies a new POV file with the 'Input_File_Name=' option, the current scene file as well as the current options are overridden. See also Understanding File Types.
This is the way to select a file from disk for immediate rendering. If the file is a POV file, it is rendered with the current options. If it is an INI file with no POV input file specified, the options will apply to the currently loaded POV file, only to be overridden by command-line settings. If the INI file specifies a POV input file, that POV scene is rendered with the options set in the INI file. See also Understanding File Types.
This is a toggle. If you are not currently rendering, the command Start Rendering instructs POV-Ray for Windows to start rendering the currently loaded POV file with the current settings. While POV-Ray for Windows is rendering, the command reads Stop Rendering and will interrupt the current rendering job.
The easiest way to see what POV-Ray for Windows is capable of is selecting this command, which renders a sample POV-Ray file to screen. To interrupt rendering, select Render/Stop Rendering or double-click on the drawer icon in the top left-hand corner of the rendering window. See also Getting Started.
This command instructs POV-Ray for Windows to run the standard POV-Ray benchmark file, using a given set of options. In version 3.7 the built-in benchmark mode has been further modified to run without accessing any other distribution files, so now benchmarking can now be done with just the compiled executable.
Note: The file itself and the options used are built into the program and may not be changed (this includes the resolution). Any options specified on the command-line will be ignored.
Be aware that during the render, there is no image display, and furthermore, no output file is produced. The only purpose of the benchmark command is to determine how long it takes to render the standard file with the specific options used.
Immediately before POV-Ray for Windows starts writing the render information to the message display, it will output a line telling you what version of the official benchmark is being used.
Note: If you choose to quote your benchmark results publicly, it is essential that you include the benchmark version and the exact version of POV-Ray that you ran it on. Changes to the benchmark file itself, and optimizations to POV-Ray, may make comparisions between different versions of the benchmark or different versions of POV-Ray meaningless, especially if it is CPU performance that you are testing.
The actual benchmark file used is built-in to the program; it is not dependent on the benchmark.pov
file which is included in the ~\scenes\advanced
directory. However, if you want to run the benchmark manually, or on another platform, you may use that file (just make sure it is the same version). The file also contains the recommended command-line parameters to be used with the render.
After the benchmark completes a dialog box will be displayed showing the average PPS (pixels per second) that the render took. Larger numbers are better (indicative of a faster and/or more efficient CPU). We recommend using this number when quoting results. The results are also copied to the clipboard.
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Selecting this command lets you look at the queue of files ready to be processed. You can add a file to the bottom of the queue or delete a file (you have to select it first by clicking on it). Once you have made your changes to the file queue, press OK to confirm the changes or Cancel to leave the queue as it was before you called up the screen. You can select multiple files in the file browse dialog box by using Control or Shift when clicking on them. |
The File Queue dialog |
The File Queue dialog box has two check-boxes in addition to the normal controls (like add/remove file etc.)
The first, Reload on Startup, when selected, causes the contents of the file queue to be stored to disk each time it is accessed. When POV-Ray is started up with this option active, and the file queue had entries in it, they are loaded off disk and back into the queue. If Auto Render was also selected, POV-Ray would then start rendering them.
The second, Auto Render, instructs POV-Ray for Windows to render whatever is in the file queue (see File Queue below). When you switch Auto Render off, any files dropped onto the POV-Ray window are added to the queue but not rendered. In other words, while Auto Render is turned off, the file queue is inactive. However, any file selected with the Render/Start Rendering command will still be processed. Once you switch Auto Render back on again, if there are files in the queue, they will begin to be processed.
Note: Due to the way that some versions of Windows returns multiple file selections to us, if you use Ctrl or Shift to select more than two files in the Add to Queue file browse box, and then click on OK, the first and last entries will be transposed. (We can't swap them back to their original position since we can't tell if the transposition has happened in the first place).
If you want to clear the entire queue in one go, this is the way to do it. The command shows you how many entries you will be throwing away.
The available render priority settings are 'Low', 'Normal, 'High' and 'Background'. Changing this setting can allow POV-Ray to get more (or less) of the CPU during renders; the higher the priority, the more CPU time should be allocated to POV-Ray. The Background setting is only available on Windows Vista or later, and causes the render to be run at a very low priority.
Some users have expressed surprise that changing render priority does not always seem to significantly affect rendering times. This will be the case if the computer in question is not doing anything else at the time. All the render priority setting does is tell Windows to change the priority it assigns to POV-Ray when it is sharing the CPU time out amongst processes. This generally only matters when you are running another CPU-intensive process on the computer; i.e. one that would compete with POV-Ray for a share of CPU time. It is then that changing this setting will make a noticeable difference. If the computer isn't doing much (other than running POV-Ray), then the render is already getting more or less all of the CPU time.
See also Speed Considerations.
The Duty Cycle setting is provided only for unusual cases of heat accumulation. It is not intended to be used in other circumstances (as it offers little benefit other than as described below). Unless you are using a laptop in a restricted environment (or perhaps in orbit), this sub-menu will be of little interest to you.
Some computers - particularly laptops or notebooks - cool their CPU's by convection. No CPU fan is used. This can make this type of device prone to overheating in certain circumstances (for example, where circulation of air is restricted, such as in a confined space, or where hot air does not, by its nature, rise, such as in zero-gravity).
POV-Ray makes extensive use of a processor's Floating Point Unit (FPU), a portion of the CPU that is not normally prone to high activity over long periods. Such use can potentially cause the CPU to generate more heat. Additionally, high CPU activity can cause the unit's normal heat-reducing facilities (such as lower-power CPU modes) to be inactive.
The Duty Cycle setting is used to tell POV-Ray to only use a certain percentage of the CPU's available time, even if nothing else is competing for the CPU. For example, a duty cycle of 10% would cause POV-Ray, during a render, to sleep for 90% of the available time, and only render during 10% of it.
During rendering, if the duty cycle is not set to 100% (the default), POV-Ray will update the status bar at the bottom of the window if it is in sleep mode. This update will show how many seconds remain until rendering starts again (which is based around a ten-second cycle). For example, a duty cycle of 70% would see POV-Ray render for seven seconds, then sleep for three.
{{#indexentry:Mark Shuttleworth, Shuttleworth, Mark, poster, reach for the stars}}Note: While it may seem far-fetched to include a feature in POV-Ray that seems primarily to be of use in zero-gravity, it in fact is for this exact reason it is here. On 25 April 2002, African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth was blasted into space in a Russian Soyuz capsule. Accompanying Mark on this launch was a copy of POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 beta 15, and a special scene written for the purpose by two of the word's best POV-Ray artists. Whilst on the International Space Station, Mark rendered a 6000x8000 pixel version of that scene. This scene is now available as a poster; see our website for more information.
Selecting this entry displays a dialog allowing you to set the number of threads used for rendering. The default value varies according to system, but in general should be equal to the number of cores available to POVWIN (or double that if hyperthreading is available). Changing this value will only affect new renders and does not persist (i.e. it is not saved upon exit). This is by design. If you wish to set a permanent value please modify POVRAY.INI or set it on the command-line.
This option, which is enabled by default, instructs POVWIN to request that Windows not go into low-power or sleep mode whilst a render is in progress. During renders if this option is set POVWIN will notify Windows once every 10 seconds that it needs use of the system; unless Windows is instructed (via power management settings) to ignore this advice it will not put the system into low-power mode. Note that this does not affect the screensaver or display power management, which will work as normal.
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In the sound setting dialogue you can enable POV-Ray to signal the finishing of a render, a parse error and a render error or cancellation of a render. For each of the three signals a specific sound (WAV file) can be set. |
The Sound Settings dialog |
The On Completion submenu allows you to specify what POV-Ray will do when it completes a rendering (or series of renderings, in the case of animations).
No special actions are taken.
This will cause POV-Ray for Windows to display a message window indicating that it has finished.
POV-Ray for Windows will exit after the render has completed.
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This menu contains settings that change the operation of POV-Ray for Windows as a whole. |
The Options Menu |
This option prevents more than one instance of POV-Ray for Windows from running at a time. If you attempt to launch a new one, the currently running one is activated instead. This is handy if you are using File Manager or Explorer to launch POV files by double-clicking. (Explorer users can get even more control by using the right mouse button menu.)
This option will alternately show or hide the toolbar, and can be used if you want more room for the editor.
Places POVWIN in the system tray on the taskbar. Double-click to restore POVWIN. You can also right-click to get a context menu.
See the I/O Restrictions topic.
This sub-menu allows you to select the destination for the files that are dropped onto the POV-Ray window from Windows Explorer or similar file managers. See Dragging and Dropping Files for full information.
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This sub-menu contains settings related to checking for updated versions of POV-Ray for Windows. |
Update Checks sub-menu |
The 'Periodically Check for Updates' feature - which is turned on by default - instructs POV-Ray for Windows to periodically ask our web server if there is a newer version of POV-Ray available than the one you are using.
Note: All POV-Ray does is check for a new version; it does not download it. We would never download files onto your computer without your permission.
If POV-Ray discovers that there is a new version available, it will display a page in your default web browser that looks something like the one depicted below -
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A sample updated version available page |
POV-Ray attempts to be both intelligent and polite about the way that it does these checks. It will not perform one unless Windows tells it that the internet is already connected. In this way, it does not cause an annoying dialer dialog to pop up while you are working. Additionally, POV-Ray does not run the checks out of a scheduler or via any third-party program - you have to be actually running POV-Ray for Windows for anything to happen. It also won't run a check the first time it is started after installation, in order to give you time to turn off the update check option if that's what you want to do.
If it successfully contacts our web server and receives a 'yes' or 'no' answer as to whether an upgrade is available, it will not attempt again for several days. If, however, it failed in its attempt to contact the server, it will try again in no less than 24 hours. POV-Ray will never contact our server more than once per day.
Note: POV-Ray uses the Microsoft WinINet functionality to perform the above connection; this means that whatever settings have been configured in the 'Internet' applet of your control panel (e.g. your proxy server) will be applied to the request.
This option - which is turned on by default - instructs POV-Ray for Windows to include some information that is valuable to the developers when it sends the above update request.
Note: We would never intentionally send any information that personally identifies you or that could violate your privacy. All we are interested in is system information that will help us better cater our userbase when we create new versions of POV-Ray. Of particular importance to us is knowing common memory, CPU, and screen configurations employed by our users.
Here is an actual sample of the information that is sent, exactly as it appears on the wire (taken as of v3.5 release candidate 5). The data sent in the current version may vary from this, but is fundamentally the same concept.
TestVersion=3.5.beta.RC5.msvc.win32 CurrentVersion=3.5.beta.RC5.msvc.win32 CPUArchitecture=0x0000 NumberOfCPUs=0x0001 ProcessorType=0x024a ProcessorLevel=0x0006 ProcessorRevision=0x0404 OSVersion=5.0 OSBuild=0x00000893 CSDVersion=Service Pack 2 BitsPerPixel=32 HorzRes=1600 VertRes=1200 NumberOfMonitors=1 HasMouseWheel=1 CPUFrequency=1396 FeatureSet=0x00004fff CPUName=AMD Athlon(tm) Processor CPUIdentifier=x86 Family 6 Model 4 Stepping 4 VendorIdentifier=AuthenticAMD PhysicalMemory=1073201152 DefaultLanguage=English (Australia)
This tells us that the machine running POV-Ray was a single-CPU box equipped with an AMD Athlon CPU running at 1396mhz (1.4ghz), and had 1,073,201,152 bytes (1 gigabyte) of RAM. It is running version 3.5.beta.RC5.msvc.win32 of POV-Ray for Windows on version 5.0 of Microsoft Windows (this is Windows 2000), which had been patched up to service pack 2. It had a single monitor, set for a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels with 32 bits per pixel. Its mouse had a mouse wheel. The user's default language selection was English.
Information like this - while seeming rather mundane - is important to us because it tells us the sort of hardware that people are using POV-Ray on.
This command instructs POV-Ray to check for an updated version immediately. If an update is available the normal update message is shown (as described above). Otherwise a message will be shown indicating the outcome (e.g. no update available, failed to contact server, etc).
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This sub-menu contains a number of less-commonly-used options so as to reduce clutter in the main options menu. |
The Other Settings sub-menu |
This sub-menu is designed to allow for selection of a video source for the experimental video image mapping feature. It is currently disabled pending a re-implementation of the capture code.
Turns the use of the internal editor on or off.
This command lets you decide whether you want POV-Ray for Windows to display the tip of the day on startup. By default, POV-Ray for Windows displays a new tip every time the program is started more than 24 hours after the previous tip was shown. Selecting Show Tips of the Day has the same effect as selecting the 'Show tip tomorrow' box in the tip screen.
Turns Tooltips on or off. A Tooltip is a little yellow window that will pop up over a toolbar button if you keep the cursor there for long enough. The tip window tells you what the button does.
Whenever you perform a render, POV-Ray for Windows generates a number of messages (active POV-Ray settings, rendering statistics etc.) in the POV-Ray window. If you select Preserve Messages, POV-Ray for Windows retains all messages generated during the current session. If you deselect this option, all existing messages are deleted every time you perform a new render. See also Clear Messages in the Edit Menu.
If you select this option, any settings you have selected during your current POV-Ray for Windows session will be stored for the next one. These include the position and size of the Main Window as well the position of the Render Window.
Selecting this option will cause the 'Help On This Menu' entries to be removed from all menus. We recommend you do this once you're an experienced user.
If you do not want to see the tip of the day pop up automatically on startup every day, you can still see a tip whenever you feel like it. If you select Show Next Tip, POV-Ray for Windows displays a single tip but keeps the 'Show tip tomorrow' box unchecked.
The preview bitmaps distributed with the POV-Ray for Windows insert menu are of a fairly small size in order to keep the size of the distributed setup file down. However, it is easy to re-render them all at a larger size (though it may take a while on a slower computer).
Just select the 'Re-Render Insert Menu Bitmaps' option and leave POV-Ray for Windows running. Eventually all the bitmaps will be replaced with larger ones.
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This sub-menu allows you to set certain properties of the message window. |
The Message Window sub-menu |
If you have chose a background image for the message window and want to change back to a plain color, you can select this command. The background takes on the currently defined background color (see Background Color below).
Use this command to determine the font POV-Ray for Windows uses to display messages and statistics. In addition to the type of (non-proportional) font, you can set font size and appearance. POV-Ray for Windows remembers the font setting between sessions.
Note: If you select italic text, this setting will not be preserved across invocations of POV-Ray.
This command lets you determine which text color best fits the background you have selected for the message window.
This command lets you select the color of the plain background for the Main Window. Note that this command has no effect while you have tiled the background with a bitmap. The color only becomes visible when you select Plain Background (see above).
You can change the tiled bitmap POV-Ray for Windows displays in its message window. Choosing Tiling Options brings up a sub-menu where you can select one of several built-in bitmaps. You can also browse your disk for other bitmaps you might prefer. POV-Ray for Windows pre-installs a number of them in the TILES subdirectory of your POV-Ray for Windows home directory. The bitmaps should have no more than 256 colors. If the BMP file you select is smaller than the Main Window, it will be tiled. If it is larger, POV-Ray for Windows fits it into the top-left corner of the Main Window and displays as much of it as the Main Window allows.
Note that because of the POV-Ray for Windows generalized palette, if you are running in 256-color mode, external bitmaps may not tile 100% perfectly, and the colors may be slightly altered. If you are running in 16-color mode, tiled backgrounds are not available at all. In practice, choosing tileable bitmaps other than the standard Marble one, using a 256-color display, will often not yield attractive results.
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This sub-menu allows you to set certain properties of the render preview window. |
The Render Window sub-menu |
POV-Ray for Windows is capable of displaying a rendering scene in 24-bit color (Truecolor). This takes up more RAM than 8-bit mode: 3 bytes for every pixel in the rendered scene. If you do not have enough RAM to spare, you should select this option. It forces POV-Ray for Windows to display the scene in 8-bit color (1 byte per pixel) and to use color dithering to represent the rendered image on the screen. If you are already using a 256-color video mode it does not make any difference since the image is already stored as one byte per pixel. Note that this does not change the way that the rendered image is stored on disk. If you are writing an output file, the file will still be 24-bit color!
In 15 or 16 bit color modes, the image is stored in memory as 24-bit but only displayed as 15 or 16 bit. No dithering is (currently) performed in these modes.
If this option is enabled (the default) and you are rendering an animation, the contents of the render window (which shows the previous frame of the animation) are not erased prior to a new frame being started. This makes it easier to see subtle changes in the image output (such as a small object moving from frame to frame, while the rest of the image stays static).
Note that the render window contents are always erased prior to the first frame, regardless of the setting of this option.
If the Render Window is closed (see Close below), you can re-display it by selecting this command. If the window is not closed in the first place (or has never been displayed), you cannot re-display it, and so the Re-display command is grayed.
Note that this command is also available on the toolbar.
This causes the Render window to close automatically when rendering is complete. This is particularly useful if you're doing quick test renders at low resolution.
This command closes the Render Window. This does not interfere with any rendering activity. Indeed, it speeds up rendering (see also Speed Considerations). To re-display the Render Window, select Re-display, use the right-mouse button speed menu on the message window, or simply click the 'Show' toolbar button.
Note that this command is also available on the toolbar.
If you make the POV-Ray for Windows Main Window active with Keep Above Main deselected, the rendering window may still be obscured by the main or any other window. Selecting Keep Above Main ensures that the rendering window pops up from under other windows whenever you make POV-Ray for Windows active. Note that if this option is set, you cannot hide the render window behind the main window (this can be a problem if you are rendering at the same time you are editing; hence the ability to set both modes via this option).
Note: If you enable this option, the 'Get Focus on Creation' and 'Hide When Main Minimized' options detailed below will be grayed out.
This command causes the POV-Ray window to get focus (pop to the foreground and become active) whenever a new file is processed. If POV-Ray for Windows is processing a file queue or animation, the POV-Ray Main Window gets focus every time a new file is initialized from the top of the queue, or a new pass over the animation source file is performed. This only applies, of course, if you are using the render window.
If you want to do other work on your Windows machine while POV-Ray is rendering, but you have the render window displayed, you will probably want to have this option off since otherwise the window will keep on popping up over whatever you are doing, each time a new image is rendered.
Hint: A handy shortcut to remember is that hitting the Escape key when the render window gets focus will return focus to the main window. This is particularly useful after a quick test render.
Note: If the 'Keep Above Main' option documented above is enabled, this option will be grayed out. This is because 'Keep Above Main' implies 'Get Focus On Creation'. If you don't want the render window to get focus on creation, you will need to turn 'Keep Above Main' off.
If you have 'Keep Above Main' turned off, the main POV-Ray window and the Render Window are no longer linked. You now have the option of continuing to show the Render Window whenever the Main Window is minimized. If you select this option, the Render Window disappears as soon as you minimize the Main Window.
Note: If the 'Keep Above Main' option documented above is enabled, this option will be grayed out. This is because 'Keep Above Main' implies 'Hide When Main Minimized'. If you don't want the render window to be hidden when the main window is minimized, you will need to turn 'Keep Above Main' off.
This sub-menu is identical to the main Editor Menu. It is included in the Options Menu for consistency.
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The Tools Menu provides you with a simple means of customizing POV-Ray for Windows. You can develop your own commands (up to 32) to show up under this menu. Since the menu is determined by the file PVTOOLS.INI, editing and reloading this INI file changes the Tools Menu. |
The Tools Menu |
The syntax of entries in PVTOOLS.INI is as follows:
[Menu] ItemN=Description [Command] ItemN=command_string [Help] ItemN=help_line
Where N is a number between 0 and 31, and entries in the [Help]
section are optional.
Item0 ... Item31
are the item numbers that define the order in which entries appear in the Tools Menu.
[Menu]
Entries in the [Menu] section are what actually appears in the Tools Menu. The '&'
character tells Windows where to put the underline in the menu entry. The underlined letter
becomes the abbreviation for the command. For example the letter 'C' in '&Click Me' would
become 'Click Me' when displayed in the Tools Menu, and you could access the command by
pressing Alt+T and then 'C'. (Alt+T activates the Tools Menu).
You should make sure that all Tools Menu entries have different abbreviations if you intend to
access them this way. Of course, you don't have to supply any abbreviation if you don't want
to.
Note: By default newer versions of Windows will not display the underline beneath the abbreviation until you press ALT. This means if you use the mouse to open the menu you won't see the underlines.
[Command]
This is the command that POV-Ray will execute for that entry. This can be a Windows EXE, a batch
file, or anything else that may be executed by the Win32 ShellExecute() API call. The command
consists of the actual command name followed by any parameters you want to supply to the program.
There are two special commands, '$S' and '$E'. $S means 'use the shell association for the
filename that follows it', and '$E' means 'open the following file in the internal POVWIN editor'.
Let's look at an example -
Item4=$S %1
Since %1 refers to the output file (see below) this means that Item 4 of the tools menu
expands to a command to Windows to open the last output file with whatever program is
associated with it. For example, if the last output file was 'c:\images\torus4.png
' then the
above command example would use whatever program is associated with PNG files (i.e. the
program that Windows runs if you double-clicked on the TORUS4.PNG
file in Windows Explorer) to
open it.
Note: If using the $S or $E special commands, do not quote the parameters with '"', even if they will have spaces in them. Both of these commands may only be supplied a single parameter, which is taken to be the entire line following the command.
POV-Ray for Windows has a number of pre-defined parameters that you can substitute into the command line before the program is run. These are defined by a percent sign ('%') followed by a letter or number. For example, '%i' means substitute the POV-Ray for Windows INI file directory in the place of the '%i'.
Let's look at the command:
notepad.exe %ipvtools.txt
If you had installed POV-Ray for Windows into the directory 'c:\povwin3
', then our standard
INI file directory would be 'c:\povwin3\ini\
'. When POV-Ray ran the above command, the '%i'
would be replaced with 'c:\povwin3\ini\
'. Note that the trailing '\' is provided by POV-Ray.
This means that:
notepad.exe %ipvtools.txt
would become:
notepad.exe c:\povwin3\ini\pvtools.txt
Here are all of the predefined substitutions:
%0 | The contents of the 'SourceFile' entry of the 'LastRender' section in PVENGINE.INI. This will be the input file provided to POV-Ray for the most recent render. This information is extracted from the rendering engine itself, rather than any input dialog or command-line. It is the file which, after all processing of the command line and INI files was complete, was finally assigned as the input file. |
%1 | The contents of the 'OutputFile' entry of the 'LastRender' section in PVENGINE.INI. This will be the output file from the last render, if any. This entry could be blank. |
%2 |
The contents of the 'SceneFile' entry of the 'LastRender' section in PVENGINE.INI. This will
be the scene file name for the last render, without the .POV extension. You can use this by
appending a new extension to it. For example,
tga2gif %d\%1 %2.gifcould expand to: tga2gif c:\scenes\myscene.tga myscene.gifassuming the input file was myscene.pov and the current directory at that time was c:\scenes .
|
%4 | The contents of the 'IniOutputFile' entry of the 'LastRender' section in PVENGINE.INI. If you had instructed POV-Ray to write an INI file from the last render, this would contain its name. |
%D | The contents of the 'CurrentDirectory' entry of the 'LastRender' section in PVENGINE.INI. This is the current working directory that was set on your machine when POV-Ray began rendering the last file, and is what the other output file entries are probably relative to. You may need to provide '%d' with some of these other entries to get the full path. |
%H |
The POV-Ray for Windows install directory, as specified in the registry or inferred at run-
time, e.g. 'c:\Program Files\POV-Ray for Windows v3.7\ '. Note the trailing backslash is supplied.
|
%P |
The POV-Ray for Windows user documents directory, as specified in the registry or inferred at run-
time, e.g. 'c:\Users\Joe\Documents\POV-Ray\v3.7\ '. Note the trailing backslash is supplied.
This is the directory where the sample scenes, include files, and INI files are stored.
|
%I |
The POV-Ray for Windows INI directory. e.g. 'c:\Users\Joe\Documents\POV-Ray\v3.7\ini\ '.
|
%N | The preset INI filename, as used in the render options dialog. |
%R | The last render file (with full path) as supplied to POV-Ray from the render or choose file dialog. This is not necessarily the same thing as %S or %0. |
%S | The source file name as provided to POV-Ray on the last render of the current session. This is not necessarily the same thing as the %0 or %R directive. For example, %R will never provide the path to a file that was rendered via the File Queue without the use of the Command dialog. %S will, however, include any such file. |
%T |
The full path to PVTOOLS.INI . This is the file which holds the Tools Menu commands.
|
%% | A literal percent character ('%'). |
If any of the above seems confusing, there's an easy way to find out what's going on. If you
place the statement DEBUG=1 in the General section of PVTOOLS.INI
, POV-Ray for Windows will
print out the string for each command both before and after it is expanded, instead of running
the command that you select in the tool menu. That way you can see exactly what POV-Ray
substitutes. The printout will be visible in the messages window.
For example:
[General] Debug=1
will turn on debugging. while
[General] Debug=0
or omitting the statement entirely turns it off.
[Help]
You can have a help line appear in the status bar at the bottom of the window. You don't have to supply this entry if you don't want to.
Example:
[Help] Item1=Edit master POVRAY.INI in installation directory
This command makes the string 'Edit master POVRAY.INI in installation directory' appear on the status bar when the mouse is over the 1st item in the Tools menu.
If you want your changes to take immediate effect after you have edited PVTOOLS.INI using a text editor, you have to select the Tools Menu command Reload Tool Menu to instruct POV-Ray for Windows to re-read the INI file and activate the new settings.
This standard Tools Menu command lets you modify PVTOOLS.INI using the Notepad editor. The command is part of PVTOOLS.INI itself, which means you may delete it entirely if you don't want it. It is present by default in the standard distribution of POV-Ray for Windows.
[Menu] Item0=Edit &master POVRAY.INI Item1=Edit PVEN&GINE.INI Item2=Edit &last rendered file Item3=Edit last &scene file Item4=&View last rendered file Item5=Edit resolution &INI file Item6=Edit &user-defined syntax file Item7=&Browse sample scenes folder Item8=Edit &this menu [Command] # NOTE! If using the $E or $E, DO NOT quote the parameters with '"'. # If you are calling a program directly, you will probably need to quote the # parameter; e.g. notepad.exe "%r" Item0=$e %pini\povray.ini Item1=$e %pini\pvengine.ini Item2=$e %r Item3=$e %0 Item4=$s %1 Item5=$e %n Item6=$e %I\user-keywords.txt Item7=$s %pscenes\ Item8=$e %t [Help] Item0=Edit master POVRAY.INI in installation directory Item1=Edit PVENGINE.INI in installation directory Item2=Edit the last file that POV-Ray was rendering Item3=Edit the last scene file that you selected Item4=View the output of the last render (assumes file output was on) Item5=Edit secondary INI file as specified in Command-line dialog Item6=Edit the user-defined syntax highlighting file Item7=Open the folder containing the sample scenes installed with POV-Ray Item8=Edit PVTOOLS.INI to alter this menu [General] Debug=0
The Window menu contains a number of commands related to editor tab management (in the context of this section, a 'window' refers to a tab in the editor) and additionally a list of tabs showing the name of their contents. At a minimum (if no files are open) this list will contain one entry: the Message tab.
The MRU (most-recently-used) arrangement of the tab list in this menu makes it trivial to toggle between files without taking your eyes off the text or using the mouse. The most recently viewed tab (i.e. the current one) will always be entry 1 in the list. The second most recently viewed (i.e. the last tab viewed before switching to the current one) will always be entry 2 in the list, and so forth. Given that entries 1 through 10 in the list are given the menu mnemonics 1 through 0 respectively, all you need to do to toggle between the current and previous files is hit Alt-W then 2. To go to the third oldest, Alt-W then 3, and so forth. Note that the MRU list is not saved on exit.
Most POV-Ray windows have shortcut (also known as 'context') menus. You access them by right-clicking over the window in question (e.g. the message, edit, or render window). The menu that appears will have the most commonly-used commands (as available in the main menus) that apply to that particular type of window.
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When the mouse right button is pressed over the Message window, a pop-up menu containing these commands are displayed: |
The Message Window context menu |
All of these commands and sub-menus except 'Minimize to System Tray' and 'Show Tip' are documented elsewhere; the following list links to that documentation.
This command (which is also available as a toolbar button) will hide POV-Ray for Windows and place a small icon in the system tray (the system tray usually contains a clock and is often at the right hand side of the task bar at the bottom of the screen).
You can use the right-mouse button on this icon to get a context menu. Double-clicking on it restores POVWIN from the tray.
If you select Show Tip, POV-Ray for Windows displays a single tip (see Show Tips of the Day).
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The Render Window context menu |
See the Render Window sub-menu for documentation on the commands in this menu.
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The Editor Window context menu |
The actual content of the line shown as 'Open "filename"' will vary according to what was on the line under the cursor when the right mouse button was clicked. All of the commands except 'Show Messages', 'Context Help', and 'Open "filename"' are documented elsewhere; the following list links to that documentation.
Manually cause the small message window to be displayed (or hidden if it is showing, in which case this menu entry will read 'Hide Message Window' instead of 'Show Message Window'). Note that you can also use the Escape key to hide the message window.
See Auto-Show Parse Messages for more information.
This command (which can also be activated with the F1 key) will cause the editor to look for the closest word to the edit caret and attempt to look it up in the help file. If more than one match is found, you will be given a choice as to which one. If no match is found, the help file will open with the index at the closest match it could find.
Whenever you open the context menu, the editor first looks underneath the edit caret to see if there is a line that looks like a POV-Ray scene file '#include' directive. If one is found, the name of the specified file is placed into the menu in place of "filename". If one is not found, then it may show Copy ... to Command-Line (see below).
If you then select this command, the editor will attempt to find and open the file in a new edit window. The standard include paths (as defined in PVENGINE.INI) will be searched if the file is not found relative to the current directory.
If, when the editor searches for an include file name on the current line (see above), it does not find one, it will then look for something that looks like a 'command line'. By 'command line' we mean a line that could be used in the toolbar command-line field as options. The editor uses several simple rules to decide if something is likely to be a command-line:
Firstly, the line must contain a '//
' somewhere. Then, either -
//
' is either a '+
'
or a '-
', and the next character after that is alphabetical, or//
' contains 'Cmd:
' (case-insensitive).
If the line fits this description then the text after the '//
' (with the 'Cmd:
' removed if it were present) is considered the command-line (minus leading and trailing whitespace). There is one slight variation to the detection rules, though:
if the line also contains a quoted string that looks like it could be a filename and you right-click before the end of that string,
the context menu will present the 'Open File in Editor' option instead of the 'Copy Command' option. To get the 'Copy Command' option,
simply make sure you right-click somewhere to the right of the filename.
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The "Copy to command-line" feature |
In this case the menu will have a command to copy the found command to the toolbar command-line, such as the one shown on the left. If this command is chosen, the text in the toolbar command-line will be replaced with the text extracted from the line, and focus will be changed to the toolbar command-line field.
The purpose of this facility is to allow users to keep a set of commonly-used command-line options at the top of the scene file, and use this facility to quickly copy one of them to the command-line for a render.
Example command-lines which could be embedded into a scene file -
// +w480 +h200 +a0.1 // +w960 +h400 +a0.1
The following would also be legal (and equivalent to the above example) -
// Cmd: Width=480 Height=200 Antialias_Threshold=0.1 AntiAlias=On // Cmd: Width=960 Height=400 Antialias_Threshold=0.1 AntiAlias=On
See also Toolbar Command Line.