In article <371A5965.C2074B43@puzzlecraft.com> , Steve 
<ste### [at] puzzlecraftcom>  wrote:

> I have learned that there are very few C++ books out that encompass the new
> ANSI standards. The Stroustrup book is pretty much a must-have for a
> referrence work. There are 2 good tutorial level books that I have found.
> "Learn C++ in 21 Days" and "Thinking in C++" are both good ones for the
> beginner ( make certain they are the latest edition). Most available books
> were published prior to the adoption of the new ANSI standards and therefore
> contain numerous errors that will not compile on a brand new compiler.

Yes, some examples won't work, but still most examples are ISO C++
compliant. That is why I suggested to learn C first - the selection of good
_and_ up-to-date books is much greater and the C code that is _not_ C++ code
is unlikely to be in a good book about C anyway.

> This is an understatement! C++ is a very complex language.

I did not want to discurrage you ;-)

> That's why I finally enrolled in classes, I just couldn't learn it on my own
> from books. However, the ps-2-pov converter is progressing. I can read in a
> the disk file and test it for validity. My current problem is locating 2
> strings in the disk file and using their addresses as begin() and end() to
> extract a portion of the file and write it to disk.

Good luck!

>> Just curious: What is better then the official version? Knowing this could
>> improve the official version...
>
> Being able to have multiple editing windows open and active is the
> outstanding feature.
>
> 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 :-)

> Being able to link an external editor to POV-Ray (BBEdit is superb).

BBEdit is a good tool...also a good (specialised) editor is enough in most
cases.

> 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...)

> I'm not sure how the faster speed is achieved. Perhaps some of the code has
> been rewritten for native PPC or perhaps the authors have found some optimal
> compiler settings. I just don't know how it's done. There will be no doubt
> about which version a PPC user will choose - faster is always better.

No, it is the same code and (now) the same compiler with no (30% worth)
different settings.

> 1 more improvement that all versions MIGHT benefit from is the ability to
> render animation previews in QuickDraw 3D, which is 100's of times faster.
> This might be impossible to achieve considering the POV scene description
> language.

Well, doing this for only one platform is nearly impossible - it is a lot of
work and some primitives are very hard to map to anything "easy" to
display/view as triangles :-(

> 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.

> Another needed upgrade is support for TrueType fonts in native Mac. After all,
> Apple invented TrueType. Also, we really should add support for Postscript
> fonts because they are the lingua franca of the professional graphics
> industry.

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).

> Of course, the importing of postscript paths into POV will be useful, I'm
> working on this at my own slow rate. Importing EPS would be even more useful
> but this is an extremely difficult project to tackle.
>
> I'd like to remark on splines a bit. The bezier_spline is the same thing as a
> bezier path in postscript. However, I was dismayed to learn that the control
> points are reversed in POV from the industry standard. I wish POV would just
> use accepted standards where possible. It's pretty simple to write a function
> to convert, but it is counterintuitive to have to reverse 15 years of
> experience - my poor old brain just won't do it.

I have to admit that I never used bezier splines. I guess that whoever wrote
the original code knew more about the math involved the bezier splines than
about standards :-)

> The standard version has it's strong points, too. For instance, the
> preferrences for an animation are either saved in the file itself or use the
> application settings. This is a nice feature that allows global revision of
> the animation preferrences for batch jobs. I do a lot of batch rendering. The
> documentation for batch rendering is, well, terrible. I'd be happy to
> contribute a rewrite for this.
>
> My current technique is to author and preview my batch animations in
> Unofficial and then do the final batch renderings in Regular. The batch
> editing feature is more valuable to me than the faster speed.

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


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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