(Today, 1:15)Chris Böhnke Wrote: Whilst this should "mostly" not be an issue, I think orientation is more complicated than that. Orientation in LDraw is typically based on the concept of "part category" which can in some cases create a bit of disconsens.
...
Part catgories are often a very subjective thing and orientation is to a degree linked to it, just keep that in mind.
I am very familiar with the issue of orientation, since I have developed my own standards for the best orientation to use when rendering the high-contrast label images. For example, I prefer minifigures to face to the right (a 90° counterclockwise rotation from the LDraw default orientation).
Inverted slopes are also tricky, since there is often only one orientation where you can see all of the relevant facets of the part.
I think an automated tool would guess parse the part shape and size, guess on the best orientation and origin, and it would be trivial within the automated tool to specify the correct offset and orientation. A simple web app would probably be best, with a small number of users who have read/write access to change the offset values. In rare cases where rotation and offset doesn't result in a viable part, just make it easy to flag the part for manual editing and block automated output.