Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

>
> C++ is a powerful language and it takes years to learn it in all details.
> For learning C++ yourself you will need another book, there are lots out
> there. Addison Wesley has published a few...
> If you have previous programming experience you may want to read "The C++
> Programming Language, 3rd Edition" by Bjarne Stroustrup (ISBN
> 0-201-88954-4). However, this book already starts on a fair level and you
> may want to understand at least C first (The book is also a useful
> reference).

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.

>
>
> In general C++ is simply to complex to explain it in a few sentences (even
> only details like type conversions). As a tip I would suggest to start with
> something less difficult than a "postscript-2-bezier_spline converter" - get
> used to the language first :-)

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

>
> Just curious: What is better then the official version? Knowing this could
> improve the official version...

#1. Being able to have multiple editing windows open and active is the
outstanding feature.
#2. Being able to link an external editor to POV-Ray (BBEdit is superb).
#3. Being able to select includes, functions and objects from a menu (very
nice).
#4. Faster rendering speed ( about 30% speed gain on 210 mhz 604 cpu).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am deeply committed to learning C++ and POV-Ray. I hope to be able to make a
small contribution some day in improving the functionality of POV.

Steve Strickland

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