Minimal POV-Ray GUI for KDE - Documentation

This is the documentation for the kminpovgui script that provides a simple graphical user interface to POV-Ray using kdialog.

For using these scripts the following prerequisites are required:

• an installed POV-Ray 3.6 or newer, optionally MegaPOV 1.1 or newer.
• a bash-compatible shell.
• the KDE desktop and the kdialog program (included in all recent versions of KDE).

This script is licensed under the BSD license.

Installation

To install copy the script into a permanent directory (preferably one in PATH) and start the script.

The kminpovgui script installs itself when being called the first time. It installs a KDE konqueror service menu for POV-Ray script files and generates a configuration file in the home directory. You will be asked how kminpovgui should operate during installation.

Installation generates the file ~/.kminpovguirc which contains the program configuration. It is interpreted by the shell every time the script is started and contains additional information like the predefined render options as comment. The format of this file is quite self-explaining.

Usage

The main use of the program is the service menu it installs. Right clicking on a POV-SDL file in Konqueror will show a Render submenu in the Actions menu that contains all available operations.

The command line options

For manually invoking kminpovgui and integrating it into your favourite editor or other programs it offers the following command line options to control operation:

-c: run in configuration mode (otherwise this is only done if no configuration file is found.
-r <file>: render the POV-Ray script file.
-m: mode of operation: 1 - show an input box to specify render options, 2 - show a menu with predefined render options, 3 - show a menu with all supported operations, 4 - render using default options without asking.
-o <options>: render options to use.
-p <program>: POV-Ray executable to use for rendering

For options not given kminpovgui uses values in the configuration file or asks the user depending on the mode configured.