Hello,

Motivation:
I have a set of GUI components done with POV-Ray. That is, a few pov-files
which are parametrized by macros and declarations from include files. I just
edit one file and run a shell script (Cygwin, bash) to create textures.
While the script is executed a set of settings files (.inc) are cycled by
the script to change the global settings (to produce base textures, nice
faded alpha masks etc).

Solution:
I would be nice if I could:
* pass include files as command line parameters
* pass declarations as command line parameters
* ...and maybe put includes and declarations to ini-files

The include files and declarations would be treated as if they were in the
pov-file. Think about C/C++ global definitions (e.g. DEBUG_ON) or java's
"-D" option (e.g. java -Dpovray.myoption.renderfoo=bar). IMHO this would
ease the use of command line POV-Ray in scripts/makefiles a lot.

Nitpicking department:
I use version "3.1g.watcom.win32" with the scripts and it is a bit of pain
in the ass...the window is always created, no messages to stdout/stderr and
you need that evil "/exit" parameter. I just learned about this promising
Cygwin-version someone has created. Anyway, I think there should be a proper
and pure command line version available for 32-bit Windozes (you know, long
filenames, no memory issues, compared to ms-dos version).

Offtopic:
Is there a command line image manipulation tool which can:
* add alpha channel to an image by using another image as source (both pngs)
* convert png to targa and preserve the alpha channel

ImageMagick failed on both...or I failed to use it correctly. It just feels
overkill to hack C-apps to do solve these trivial problems (well, I already
did, but... ;)

Tero Kukola

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