Standards / Frontend-Backend / Hypothetical scenario...

How about this?

What if the contents of each include file be strictly limited to ONE
macro/object or ONE class of macros/objects/textures/etc?  Furthermore,
let's establish a standardized scene - or scenes - ( camera, light_source,
objects with textures ).  That way, if a user were to copy-and-paste the
the new object/texture/light_source/camera from the include file into the
standardized scene ( replacing as necessary), and then render the test
image in a standardized render window, then the object/texture would make
immediate sense to the user.  This might entail a submittal-and-approval
process on the part of whomever maintains the collection.  Also, if one of
these specialized include files calls another include file, then the prior
include file must also be made available.

Second, how about having a backend for archiving (to be organized by
whomever maintains the collection) and a front-end for browsing and
searching.  For an example of what I mean, take a look at
http://kde-apps.org/.

Here's a scenario:
I am currently creating an array of 96 unions of objects, each representing
a text character (ascii 32 - 127).  In my current include file, I have
another array of floats which specify the width of each character and a
macro which accepts a string as a parameter and returns a union of the
correspondinding elements of the first array, each cumulatively translated
by the widths of the preceeding characters (so that I can easily "write"
words in my scene using my font).

In terms of what I propose then, the text-layout macro would be submitted by
itself (or with related macros) as a 'text-utility include file'.  The
object array and the float array would be submitted in a standardized
format as an 'object-font include file' (which makes use of the macro in
the first file).  That way, others could submit their own object-font
include files which also make use of the same text-utility file.

Then, when users browse the section called "Object Fonts" in the frontend,
they would see sample images of the povver's fonts, they could read a
description, they would see how large the include file is, they might be
able to read/submit comments, and they would be allerted to the fact that
the file is dependent upon text-utility file "object-font_layout.inc".

I hope this is helpful.

Yours,
Randall

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