> 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. It's always been
easier for me to just let a vector drawing program do the conversion to cubic
beziers, a beautifully efficient yet precise way of describing curves, and
export from there.  That way, too, you can use any curve not just fonts. What
would be more useful would be if POV could handle cubic beziers more directly in
a tubular shape like sphere sweeps, for example -- rather than having to
subdivide everything first into tiny linear splines and connect the dots. Never
had much luck with sphere_sweep, especially with transparent materials, because
it doesn't play nice with merge and seems to have too much tolerance for gaps.

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