			TRANSLATORS

This directory contains contributed CAD translators and image file
converters for going to and from Radiance.  Most of the programs should
be here as compressed tar files that unpack to create a directory with
the appropriate Makefile and manual page(s).

By convention, CAD format translators are named something like *2rad,
and usually do not perform the reverse conversion from Radiance models
to the CAD system.  Image file converters, on the other hand, should
provide a '-r' option to go from the foreign image format to a Radiance
floating point pictures.  The convention for image converter names is ra_*.

The following translators have been contributed so far:

archicad.sea.hqx - A converter from ArchiCAD for the Mac
archicad2rad.c	- C program extracted from above on March 4, 1994
stratastudio.sea.hqx - A converter from StrataStudio for the Mac
dem2rad.tar.Z	- A translator from Digital Elevation Maps to gensurf input
dxf2rad.lisp	- An AutoLISP DXF translator [uncompressed]
ra2pict.tar.Z	- A translator from Radiance to Macintosh PICT (forward only)
ra_xim.tar.Z	- A translator between Radiance pictures and Ximage format
ra_rle.c	- A translator from Radiance pictures to Utah RLE format
sgirgb.tar.Z	- Translators to and from SGI RGB image format
torad.tar.Z	- An improved AutoLISP translator for Radiance

If you are planning to write a CAD format translator for Radiance, please
consult the translators file in the ray/doc/notes directory of the standard
Radiance distribution.

If you wish to write an image converter, please avail yourself of the
Radiance scanline color manipulation routines in ray/src/px and
ray/src/common:  color.h, resolu.h, color.c, colrops.c, header.c and
resolu.c.  You may use start from the ra_skel.c example converter.  If
you are converting to 8-bit color, you may also want to use the
routines in clrtab.c.  You can follow ra_t8.c as an example of 8-bit
color conversion.  If you are converting to some raw image format, you
should check that pvalue doesn't do the conversion already.
