STL is one of those weird formats where there is a difference between ASCII and Binary.
Binary is "simple" and much smaller (due to less overhead). It basically makes a list of 3 numbers "wide" and number of triangles long. The first point is X, the second point is Y and the third point is the Z. Repeat this until you have all the polygons
The Ascii version of STL does something different. It provides a "human readable" version of the file that looks like
facet normal ni nj nk outer loop vertex v1x v1y v1z vertex v2x v2y v2z vertex v3x v3y v3z endloop endfacet
But as you can already see, it suddenly is supported (at least, technically) to have a single face that isn't a triangle. Why the hell someone decided to have a completely different functionality set based on how you stored it is beyond me (it's also why the only reason that we use STL is because everyone uses it, not because it's actually good)
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Stefania Dinea 102
@SandervG - I usually export in binary - never questioned this system since it was never really explained, from other software i control the number of polygonson export, but Revit does not have this option -- buhu!
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