I was going through some old files, and ran into a problem parsing the
following:


#declare firenice =
 array[9] {

    "SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE",

    "SOME SAY IN ICE",

    "FROM WHAT I'VE TASTED OF DESIRE,",

    "I HOLD WITH THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE;",

    "BUT SHOULD IT HAVE TO PERISH TWICE,",

    "I THINK I KNOW ENOUGH OF HATE,",

    "TO SAY THAT FOR DESTRUCTION, ICE -",

    "IS ALSO GREAT -",

    "AND WOULD SUFFICE."

    }

I get the error "Could not convert System Specific Text format to Unicode"

I've tried re-typing the text to remove non-system characters, but it has no
effect.  I've rendered this before, so I know it works.  Was there some change
to the text handling in the beta?

thanks in advance

A.D.B.

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Well, I feel foolish... For some reason I had charset sys in global settings...

On another note, I was under the impression that pov auto-detected system fonts
since version 3.1 or something...  I keep having to specify a directory and an
exact file name...

am I doing something wrong?

I currently do all my rendering in Ubuntu.

A.D.B.

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Le 08/11/2010 20:14, Anthony D. Baye a écrit :
> Well, I feel foolish... For some reason I had charset sys in global settings...
> 
> On another note, I was under the impression that pov auto-detected system fonts
> since version 3.1 or something...  I keep having to specify a directory and an
> exact file name...
> 
> am I doing something wrong?
> 
> I currently do all my rendering in Ubuntu.

Nothing wrong from your part.
Povray starts with a few default fonts' directories, according to the
system you are on, in the system & user default configuration files or
registry....

On Windows, all installed fonts in the system are in a single directory
(something like c:\WINDOWS\Fonts, but location can vary), so a single +L
in the configuration file is enough. (it's just a big mess to manage:
here just 612 files in that one!)
And Windows had an history of ignoring case of filename (fat32 did not
support them, and default to NTFS is only a recent move in term of
casual user's windows' generation), so most opening routine files in
windows will try to ignore the case of the characters in a file name.

On Ubuntu, the truetype fonts are in /usr/share/fonts/truetype and
usually then in a subdirectory (so each package does not have to resolve
conflict when it installs a set of fonts).
And to make things less easier, whereas in Windows install the
pvengine.ini has a %FONTDIR% in the input paths, there is no such
provision during the povray installation
(/usr/local/etc/povray/3.7/povray.ini for 3.7beta), so a Unix
installation ends up without any path to fonts by default.

(Ubuntu puts fonts in /usr/share/fonts, but that's not yet universal for
all unix)

And unix has a tradition of distinguishing case in filename (due to the
various filesystems doing that from a long time), so the name must match.

Best fix for you: add the many fonts directory in your povray.ini (as
+L= .... ) (either at the system level, or in $HOME/.povray/... ), and
take care of the case of font's filename in your script.

-- 
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