The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray).
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Opened by Timwi - 2013-03-24
Last edited by Christoph Lipka - 2013-03-24
FS#284 - Add to documentation of "background" command a reference to the +UA option
Currently neither of these pages:
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.7.0/253/
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.7.0/90/
mention that the background can be transparent. Any normal user will try to give “background { ... }” a transparent color, see that it doesn’t work, and assume that POV-ray can’t do it.
The pages should mention the +UA command-line option, which enables the transparency.
Sunday, 24 March 2013, 23:11 GMT
Reason for closing: Fixed
Additional comments about closing:
The links you hand-made (they don't exist at any official place) are auto redirects to 3.6.1 documentation. Please look at the current 3.7 RC documentation that comes with the 3.7 RC or at the online version at wiki.povray.org. It contains all the information you need: http://wiki.povray.o rg/content/Reference:Background
Why are you resisting the improvement of the documentation for the benefit of users in the same situation as I was?
The improvement you're asking for has already been added to the official 3.7 documentation. The links you provided do not comprise the official 3.7 documentation.
Thanks. I appreciate that wiki.povray.org did contain the information. However, I feel I should point out that in all my googling for POV-ray information, never once did wiki.povray.org ever come up as a search result for any relevant query, including “povray transparent background”, “povray png transparency”, or even “povray <some_object>” such as “povray cylinder” or something. The top few search results all point to the 3.6.0 documentation, and then lots of people’s homepages come up, none of which themselves ever link to wiki.povray.org. Now that I know of wiki.povray.org, I will definitely look there in the future, but other people who download POV-ray and try to find information like this will still be in the same position as I was.
I appreciate that wiki.povray.org did contain the information. However, I feel I should point out that in all my googling for POV-ray information, never once did wiki.povray.org ever come up as a search result for any relevant query [...]
Note that POV-Ray for Windows (which you are using) comes with the documentation included, you can access it via the menu from inside the program. Also, a link to the Wiki is provided on the povray.org page. Further, using a search engine does not mean you should ignore common sense when you need help - usually the documentation and the newsgroups are available for help. Making false bug reports is not helpful, however, especially given I kindly asked you to first discuss issues you suspect to be bugs in the newsgroups just a few days ago.
As for searching, you can very well find POV-Ray 3.7 documentation and the Wiki using Google if you let it know that you are looking for 3.7 documentation. I.e. https://www.google.com/search?q=pov-ray+3.7+background+reference contains the correct answer as the second hit (note: your results may vary as Google localises search results).