After some reading, here are my ideas regarding u3d support for Jmol: The two key documents are
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/U3DElements_v9.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-363.htm It looks to me that for now it is not feasible to implement a u3d encoder for Jmol. The reason I say this is that there is the clear indication in the Adobe document that Adobe 8.0 will have a new encoding option that is totally different from the previous ECMA standard. This new option is far simpler and far more flexible than that described in the Ecma standard, which is very complex unless the uncompressed option is chosen, and that cannot be done, it seems, becaue the Adobe documentation notes that Acrobat 7 can crash or refuse to decode a u3d file that has the uncompressed format. But Acrobat 8 will support uncompressed data and several other simple options. In addition, I worry that we would have to encode every single atom as a separate mesh. I could be wrong there -- maybe you get to re-use meshes. But it's not obvious how that would work -- I would need to see some files. Forget text altogether, as far as I can see. In short, it's something to look into and certainly to follow the progress of. This could be a good "summer of code" project. Bob -- Robert M. Hanson Professor of Chemistry St. Olaf College 1520 St. Olaf Ave. Northfield, MN 55057 http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr phone: 507-786-3107 If nature does not answer first what we want, it is better to take what answer we get. -- Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lecture XXX, Monday, February 5, 1900 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
