Am 17.04.2010 20:01, schrieb Stephen Klebs:
>> Surely it wouldn't be hard to patch a text-to-spline
>> function into pov's code?
>
> That wouldn't be as simple as it sounds though. Different fonts - TrueType,
> OpenType, Postscript, etc. - use different flavors of splines.

Given that POV-Ray only supports TrueType fonts anyway, we'd be talking 
about a single spline type only.

While you do advocate Bezier splines (cubic I suppose), that's not 
necessarily a contradiction: TrueType uses quadratic B-splines, which 
can just as well be expressed in terms of cubic Bezier splines.

And speaking of it, PostScript happens to use cubic Bezier splines 
"natively", while OpenType comes in two flavors, which "concidentally" 
use the same underlying representation as TrueType and PostScript, 
respectively.

So I guess there's no reason why POV-Ray shouldn't grow some feature to 
automatically generate splines from fonts.

And yes, you're right: POV-Ray is definitely in lack of consistency 
regarding support of spline types:

- b_spline is only available in sphere_sweep
- quadratic_spline is available everywhere /except/ in sphere_sweep
- natural_spline is only available in spline

And last not least, allowing to use predefined splines in sphere_sweep, 
prism and lathe would be pretty neat I think (with sphere_sweep 
obviously neding either a 4D spline or an additional 1D-spline to 
represent radius).

What's really missing in POV-Ray is an internal framework for 
consolidating all the spline-based stuff.

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