[Radiance-general] IES file viewer

[R Fritz]

By popular demand, PhotomView 0.2 may be downloaded from:

   http://students.washington.edu/rfritz/photom_view/

user/password = phoview/radiance

There are three files there:
   pvsrc.zip (16KB) contains the sources; as far as I know they'll  
work on any system that has a fairly recent python and supports wxpy  
and Python OpenGL.
   PhotomView.zip (15MB, no, that's not a typo--it's big).  A zipped  
Mac OS application bundle; I expect it to work on any current Leopard  
Mac--just unzip it and double-click on the app.  As far as I know it's  
complete in itself.
   ies_files.zip (29KB)

Operation, I hope, is simple: select the "file>open" menu item and  
pick an IES file; if it's type C photometry, you'll see a wireframe  
picture of the photometry (types A and B aren't yet supported).  Hold  
down the first mouse button and drag--you can rotate it.  The XY plane  
is the blue one.  If you select the "Window>Show Photometric Data"  
menu item it shows the photometric data as formatted text.  That's the  
whole functionality.

It's alpha.  The biggest limitation, of course, is that it only  
supports type C photometry.  It would be, as we say, A Small Matter of  
Programming to support types A and B but I'm frying other fish (and  
being graded on them!) at the moment.

The best thing, I think, in the sources is the iesphotom.py module,  
which is a general-purpose IES photometry parser.  I think it's pretty  
complete, though some of the odd corners of the 1995 spec may not  
work.  ([BLOCK] keyword, anyone?  I did make an effort, but I've no  
idea if it's complete.  And no MGF support--sorry, Greg.)   
Iesphotom.py uses the public domain markup.py module, which I've  
included, to generate HTML-formatted photometry output.  If you invoke  
it as "python iesphotom.py file.ies" it will send an HTML-formatted  
version of the photometry to the standard output.

If you want to work with the PhotomView.py graphical file, you will  
need Python (2.3.5 or higher) and the wxPython, numpy, and PyOpenGL  
packages; wxPython is bundled with MacOS 10.5.  It has problems on  
Windows, but does operate with Python 2.5.
(There is no numpy on Windows Python 2.6 yet.)  If you try it on *nix,  
let me know if it works.

Have fun!  Let me know about the changes.

Randolph