Thanks for a very well written response!

Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> In article <371A5965.C2074B43@puzzlecraft.com> , Steve
> <ste### [at] puzzlecraftcom>  wrote:
> >
> > The multiple editors feature alone makes Unofficial preferrable to Regular.
> > The feature is so useful that I cannot bring myself to go back to using a
> > single editing window.
>
> Yes, that is a feature that needed to be added to the official version for a
> long time...the 9+ year history of the code wasn't any help and the official
> Mac 3.5 will offer at least a clear cut on this (and some other long overdue
> features :-)

Awrite! I know the PC folks will love this, too. It's an improvement that ALL
povray users will enjoy. However, us Mac users will lose our big advantage.

>
> > Faster rendering speed ( about 30% speed gain on 210 mhz 604 cpu).
>
> Hmm, this claim only holds when comparing the unofficial version with 3.1.
> As CW Pro 4 came out sortly after the release of the official version they
> had the advantage to use for their unofficial version. You will find that
> this argument no longer holds with 3.1d :-)   (Except for the preview, but
> that is very technical...)

Ahhh. I haven't tried 3.1d. I have been very pleased with 3.1 in general - it was a
very MAJOR upgrade that shows a tremendous amount of thoughtful work. I'm glad
ya'll used CodeWarrior 4 since that is what I'm currently using.

> > Another useful improvement would be to add a full blown aete resource so that
> > POV-Ray would be fully scriptable with Frontier. This would allow for a fully
> > automated method for creating and rendering POV jobs. The Unofficial team is
> > working on this.
>
> The official 3.5 version will have multiple-text editors and will be
> recordable - anything else is to early to say.

Actually, this is important to advanced Mac users. Quite a few Mac applications are
now scriptable through the aete resource. One problem with being simply recordable
the way Photoshop is - the application cannot be used by another application.
Adding an aete resource would make POV-Ray recordable as well as scriptable in a
more valuable way. After all, we can record scriptable applications in Frontier. I
consider this to be the only major shortcoming that Photoshop has. I hope that we
can avoid making the same mistake in POV-Ray.

> The TrueType font text objects are part of the core code - Mac store fonts
> in resources while all other platforms use what is the data fork for the Mac
> (since Mac OS 8.5 data fork fonts are at least, finally supported). I have
> included an experimental converter with the official 3.1d, it works on at
> least with 95% of all fonts (converts them from resource fork representation
> to data fork representation).
>
This is valuable and very useful work! The demand for 3D effects in typography
cannot be overestimated because there seems to be no limit. POV-Ray could make an
extraordinary 3D typesetter with very little enhancement. Keep up the good work
here!



> There will change a lot in the Mac part of 3.5 - it will be a total C++
> rewrite, but it is still some time ahead.  3.1f will come first and clean up
> the docs (CompuServe changes...), perhaps CW Pro 5 comes out in the next few
> weeks - I hope it will improve speed a bit more again.
>
>     Thorsten

Yes, CW5 is much anticipated. Rewriting POV into C++ is a much desirable goal as
well. This will signal a major breakthrough to further development. The properties
of OO seem particularly useful in future POV-Ray development. Authors can write
code that will not interfere with existing code. Perhaps with C++, POV can
eventually support plug-ins!

steve

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