[Kommander-devel] Extending KPovmodeler

[Eric Laffoon]

Hi,
I recently found a need to illustrate some designs for my business and having 
used Povray years ago and thinking Kpovmodeler was cool I tried it out. I was 
pretty rusty but in a short time I had a decent result. A breakthrough was 
finding the examples... I was reading an article and it asked why build 
something instead of using the included examples which caused me to search my 
installed KDE tree to find them. I would suggest making them more evident 
somehow. Anyway, great program! I have some questions and a suggestion.

First off it looks like it's not getting much attention right now. One thing 
that is frustrating is dealing with includes which choke on import, as well 
as how to make libraries on default paths more accessible in dialogs... well, 
that and it would help if I had more of a clue what I was doing. ;-) I see 
some of this referenced in your do list and I was going to look at the 
source. Some relatively simple patches might yield some nice results. I'm 
just curious what your status and plans are?

I was thinking what could improve the user experience and aside from adding 
macros and includes and being able to use megapov I think interesting things 
could happen with raw Povray and Kommander. Kommander is part of the 
kdewebdev module and in provides scripted dialogs that can communicate 
through stdin/stdout and DCOP. It could make it relatively easy for a user to 
create a dialog for handling raw Povray functions. If one could create an 
association to a dialog in a custom object that object could call the dialog 
which could parse data and populate widgets when called. It could then send 
the formatted data back on completion. An external parsing script could even 
be made available for import/export. The potential would extend even to 
saving formula date in a comment that could populate the dialog and 
generating pov or internal kpm file data.

Other interesting things might be using KNewStuff to exchange plugins, 
templates and such and maybe a KTextEditor plugin for raw Povray. As far as 
templates go Quanta uses a very simple template system that works with 
defined KDE file locations and a hidden file which can hold processing 
information. My objective was to make as simple and neutral a system as 
possible. Please feel free to use any of our design if it's of use.

At this point I consider KPovemodeler to be outstanding and nearly perfect. It 
is largely my skills that are lacking adequacy, but with just a few small 
things it seems it is very close to being all I could want. I'm just looking 
to see if I might be able to help in some way to get it there, though I'm 
also quite busy too. It's been very useful and I'm pondering more extensive 
uses like architectural visualization for my new place.
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module