In article <39A1794B.76E9040D@ida.utb.hb.se>, sa9### [at] idautbhbse 
wrote:

> Well, that's another side of the story (?). I believe some sort of 
> export function that wrote a target file in a target format should be 
> a better solution, as that wouldn't require as strict syntax as 
> required by an external parser. I guess that POV's inner 
> representation of an object is easier to export than it is for an 
> external program to rebuild the object from reading a scene file 
> written by a user, as there are as many ways of indenting and coding 
> as there are users. A lot of data could also get lost that way, I 
> suppose.

Indenting and spacing aren't a problem, the parser ignores white space 
in most cases. And while an exporting feature in POV would solve the 
parsing problem, most formats store polygons or triangles, so you would 
still have the problem of tesselating the objects. And exporting 
textures, interiors, and object flags would be difficult.
If you exported to another format and converted back to POV, you 
wouldn't get the same thing. You would probably end up with higher parse 
time, a huge or obviously faceted mesh, higher memory consumption, and 
your texturing and other information would disappear.

And besides, POV is a renderer, not a file converter. Allowing it to 
read other formats would make sense, but writing may not.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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