[TxMt] Re: Syntax coloring for POV-Ray?

[James Reynolds]

On Oct 24, 2006, at 4:22 AM, Jacob Rus wrote:

> James Reynolds wrote:
>> I'm interested in syntax coloring for POV-Ray.  Has anyone worked  
>> on this?
>
> Nope, but it's on the requested bundles list, and I'd be glad to  
> help out if you run into any snags.  I say go for it!  And stop by  
> the [##textmate][irc] channel so we can help you out!  POVRay is  
> great, and it would be really neat if we could get images to, e.g.,  
> render and show up in the TM webkit view.

Ok, how do I start?  Should I copy an existing bundle or start from  
scratch.  I've written a simple POV-Ray parser using Perl, so I have  
a pretty good understanding of how to read POV-Ray code, but I'm only  
a few weeks old with TextMate, and haven't really studied it's syntax  
highlighting engine at all.

The only problems I see with rendering from TextMate and displaying  
the results is: POV-Ray makes tga files by default; POV-Ray requires  
command line arguments that change or an ini file that typically  
isn't edited.  So if I'm editing a .pov file, if I chose render, it  
would have to either figure out where my ini file was located or ask  
me for the command line options.  None of that information is stored  
in the .pov file.  To do this, I would want a project?...  not sure.

Also, is it possible to include the povray binaries with the bundle?   
It would have to be huge as POV-Ray licensing requires the source  
code to be distributed with any binary.

Another funny question.  Can I take the syntax rules that TextMate  
uses and use it as the rules for a parser engine?  My Perl parser is  
pretty simple, and it would be cool if I could make it more  
functional (like for it to be able to understand expressions).

James