Why is .STL the standard ?

[LambdaFF]

Hi everyone,
I have been wondering of late why all the online libraries and slicer softwares are STL compatible.
This format creates so many issues linked to the meshing, why don't we use as standard formats that are much less prone to issues and keep the geometry moer precisely ?

[LambdaFF]

Just wondering. I vaguely recall from engineering design courses that some formats save the exact geometry, not a meshed approximation.

[awerby]

It's a legacy thing. This is a non-proprietary mesh format that's been around for a long time, and while it's somewhat cumbersome, everybody's been able to deal with it one way or another. There certainly is no shortage of alternative formats, but many of them are owned by companies, and some require proprietary geometry kernals to decode. As color printing becomes more widespread, we might see more of a move toward PLY, which encodes color information along with the vertices, but for now STL remains the standard for 3D printing.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[ChiloquinRuss]

I would like to see a good stl editor! Russ

[jfkansas]

I would like to see a good stl editor! Russ

Blender or if you have the dough, 3ds Max.

[Geoff]

Blender or if you have the dough, 3ds Max.

Yep, Blender is the go I reckon. Free, pretty easy to use and native STL import features.