January 2005 - Therion

Section problem
by Andrew Atkinson 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

Sorry Typically, just after I sent the email I found the problem, on sectB I had the line type set to section instead of wall, fixed that and now it worked, although I still think that the error message with different information may have saved me a few hours Andrew

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another set of inside-out pillars
by Wookey 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

I've added another km or so - the go-on series. No real problems except that all the pillars were inside-out. I split it into two scraps instead of one huge one, thereby determining in which half the problem lay, but after much staring at it and checking line types and looking at debug mode and fixing various problems, I still can't see why it's confused. The problem scrap is goon_s2 and it goes wrong on its own as well as when processed as part of the big plan. There are no therion errors about overlapping outlines, although there is one red metapost entry in the list (what do those mean?) The set of files is at http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/terikan.tgz (no pics). As ever, clues welcome. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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problem compiling on debian woody
by Roman Muñoz 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

Hi, this is my first post I'm trying to compile in debian woody with Tcl/Tk8.4 from www.backports.org. BWidget is 1.3 from woody. Tkimg is compiled from source. This is what I am getting: tatel@ganbo:~/src/therion$ make g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thdate.o thdate.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thexception.o thexception.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thbuffer.o thbuffer.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thmbuffer.o thmbuffer.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thlogfile.o thlogfile.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thtmpdir.o thtmpdir.cxx g++ -c -Wall -DTHLINUX -O2 -o thparse.o thparse.cxx thparse.cxx: In function `void thparse_image(char *, double &, double &, double &)': thparse.cxx:756: implicit declaration of function `int round(...)' make: *** [thparse.o] Error 1 What should I do? Thanks, Roman

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arranging files for big systems
by Wookey 17 Jan '05

17 Jan '05

OK - now that I have a few non-trivial chunks of therion data to bring together I have re-arranged everything in a big-cave way. This has of course caused some problems. I am documenting them here. What I want to be able to do is produce a whole area map as well as smaller maps of each cave in the area, and maybe parts of a cave, and keep related data together,but only have it appear in one place. I know how to do this in survex, using a directory for each major cave or area. That contains an 'overview file' that is something like: *survey terikan *equate elevator.pt3.18b evening.25 *include elevator.svx *equate river.40 goon.0 *inculde goon.svx ... *end terikan so connections between surveys are here, but not connections within surveys (they are inside each .svx sub-file), and also connections (equates) are grouped together with the relevant files. So, I have an overall file for terikan in therion form but if I try to use the above structure - i.e like this: survey terikan map <scraplist> endmap input elevator.th2 input goon.th2 ... join <whwatever> centreline equate 0@goon 40@river input goon.th equate 25@evening 18b(a)pt3.elevator input elevator.th endcentreline endsurvey terikan then I get an error: therion: error -- terikan/terikan.th [72] -- not enough data readings at the first line that is an 'input <something>.th' The only way I can get it to work is by moving all the equates into one block, wrapped in a centreline/endcentreline command But for a big system this gives you a huge list of equates in one place and ahuge list of inputs below - it'smuch nicer to have the equates in the file next to the relevant inputs IMHO. So questions: 1) is my preferred arrangement possible/permitted in therion? How do would one do it? 2) Why do I get the error 'not enough data readings'? That seems to have very little to do with the actual problem - it took me some time to work out how to make it go away. I have more questions about arranging scraps and submaps too, but those can wait till another mail. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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survex to therion conversion script
by Wookey 12 Jan '05

12 Jan '05

A couple of people asked about this, so here it is under a sensible title so people can find it in the archives. Below is a perl script which does a reasonable job of converting .svx files to .th files. Written by Olly. I have noticed a few problems, which I might as well document here as as good a place as any: (I was going to tidy them up and send them to Ol as I was given said script for 'testing'). *calibrate declination comes out wrong. It should be: *calibrate declination n -> declination n degrees therion doesn't understand 'ignoreall' - needs commenting out Doesn't try to deal with different 'team' syntax - but could be fixed to get most of them right ((lower case them all), 'pics'->'pictures', 'disto'->'length #disto' etc) Only significant problem was with 'overview' files which include a number of others. * All the equates need enclosing in 'centreline'/'endcentreline' * The converter reads in any 'included' files and inserts them. It stopped after doing two of these and truncated the file. It should probably just convert '*include foo' to 'input foo.th' It once inserted a top-level 'dummy' survey where one wasn't needed. This is a feature of converting files individually rather than as a coherent dataset, I suspect. It could probably do a better job if it 'spidered' the dataset from a top-level overview file, but that's a lot more work :-) I found one case where the ';' remained for the comment char instead of it getting converted to '#'. I need to look at that or send ol the offending file. Then you can do this to convert a whole directory: for FILE in ls *.svx; do FILE=echo $FILE | sed "s/.svx//"; echo "Converting $FILE.svx"; svx2th $FILE.svx > $FILE.th; done #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; # svx2th v0.1 # Copyright (C) Olly Betts 2004 sub convert_file($); my $in_survey = 0; my $had_fix = 0; print "encoding iso8859-1\n"; for my $filename (@ARGV) { convert_file($filename); } if ($in_survey) { print "endsurvey dummy\n"; } sub convert_file($) { my $filename = shift; open F, "<", $filename or die "$filename: $!\n"; my @lines = <F>; close F; my $in_centre_line = 0; my $lineno = 0; my $dummy_survey = -1; foreach $_ (@lines) { ++$lineno; # Replace ; with # as comment separator. # FIXME won't cope with ; in a filename or *title s/;/#/; # Comment out "*export" and "*entrance" as there seems to be no # equivalent of either. if (/^\s*\*\s*(?:export|entrance)\b/i) { print "#$_"; next; } if ($in_centre_line) { if (/^\s*\*/ && !/^\s*\*\s*(?:date|calibrate|fix|equate|data|instrument|units|sd|infer|flags|team)\b/i) { print "endcentreline\n"; $in_centre_line = 0; } } else { if (/^\s*[^\s*#]/ || /^\s*\*\s*(?:date|calibrate|fix|equate|data|instrument|units|sd|infer|flags|team)\b/) { if (!$in_survey) { # Therion can't handle these outside a centreline which # must be inside a survey, so we have to add a dummy # top-level survey. print "survey dummy -title \"Therion is crap\"\n"; ++$in_survey; } print "centreline\n"; $in_centre_line = 1; } } # *begin <survey> -> survey <survey> if (s/^(\s*)\*(\s*)begin\b(\s*)(\S+)/$1$2survey$3$4 -title "$4" /i) { ++$in_survey; print $_; next; } # *begin -> <nothing> # The *begin will cause an endcentreline / centreline pair to be # output which hopefully prevents settings from escaping. However # this doesn't restore the old settings, just undoes any new ones. # FIXME: Need to address this somehow... if (/^(\s*)\*(\s*)begin\b[ \t]*$/i) { ++$in_survey; if ($dummy_survey != 0) { # FIXME: doesn't coped with nested *begin with no arguments... die "This convertor doesn't currently handle nested *begin with no arguments\n"; } $dummy_survey = $in_survey; print "#$_"; next; } # *end [<survey>] -> endsurvey [<survey>] if (s/^(\s*)\*(\s*)end\b/$1$2endsurvey/i) { if ($dummy_survey == $in_survey) { $_ = "#$_"; $dummy_survey = -1; } --$in_survey; if ($in_centre_line) { print "endcentreline\n"; $in_centre_line = 0; } print $_; next; } # *title <title> -> # -title <title> # FIXME: just comment out for now - should really convert to -title on # the "survey" line. if (s/^(\s*)\*\s*title\b\s*/$1# -title /i) { print $_; next; } # *team and *instrument format is unspecified in Survex, and they're # just informational so comment them out for now... # NB therion seems to be case sensitive so "Compass" isn't a valid role # ("compass" is)... # NB in *team pics -> pictures if (s/^(\s*)\*(\s*(?:team|instrument))\b/#$1$2/i) { print $_; next; } # *include -> literal text inclusion. # Note that the *include means an implicit *begin, but the output # may not reflect this correctly (since we can't handle *begin # with no survey name anyway...) if (/^\s*\*\s*include\s*"?([^"\s]*)/i) { # Use Unix path separators (/ not \) - Survex understands either on # either platform. my $filename = $1; $filename =~ s!\\!/!g; $filename .= '.svx' unless $filename =~ /\.svx$/i; convert_file($filename); next; } # survey.subsurvey.12 -> 12(a)subsurvey.survey if (s/^(\s*)\*(\s*equate)\b/$1$2/i) { # Ensure that a comment separator doesn't get eaten by station name. s/(\S)#/$1 #/; s/(\S+)\.(\S+)/"$2\@".join(".",reverse split m!\.!, $1)/ge; print $_; next; } if (/^\s*\*\s*fix\b/i) { $had_fix = 1; } s/^(\s*)\*/$1/; print; } } Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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change to flags and subtypes (was Re: rock-border cannot be presumed)
by Andrew Atkinson 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

Wookey wrote >>> > >>> > OK - changing therion this way would be easy - but converting existing >>> > data is difficult. I would be very happy if I could remove > >> subtypes, but > >>> > it would be quite substantial change... > >> >> It it really that difficult to write some perl conversion that >> would usually >> do the right thing? >> >> I think you are right that this was a design error and we should fix it if >> at all possible. There are not that many datasets now - in the >> future it will >> only get harder... >> >> I think we should say that this will change in 0.4 or something. If we can >> add the new functionality now/soon so that people can create new >> data in the >> new style, then that will make it easier to convert (because >> there will be a >> version that can cope with old and new data for people to use until they >> have converted). >> >> I don't want to break my dataset any more than necessary, but if >> changes are >> necessary for long-term growth, and we can design a reasonable transition, >> then it is probably worth doing. >> The difference and different ways to get the same thing confused me, I think that although it would break my data, it would be better to change it now so that the program can be developed coherently in the future. Andrew PS On a related topic, how does Therion now fit with survex, I have to say that I am finding data set conversion a little tedious, and I have not tried to for a big cave yet.

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rock-border cannot be presumed
by Wookey 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

I have a rock-border that is presumed, but this is not a permitted subtype. How should should a thing be drawn in therion? Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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General note and suggestions
by Wookey 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

After the last week or so I have come up with qiute a few small problems and interface improvements. Here they all are for discussiona and consideration. This is part of my reaction to Stacho asking about year ago for a suggested list of extra keystrokes. A couple of these have been mentioned before, but here is the whole list anyway. Whilst loading a new file in map editor it says 'noname0x.th2' in a slightly confusing manner. It should show nothin or the name of the files that is being loaded. Can't create a point if it happens to be where the yellow direction tick is (or the control handle of previous point). Makes it difficult to do small stuff like rocks. I think this is a bug. You can't move two points together (e.g if you have ended two lines at the same point but want to adjust them, you have to do them both separately). Not sure how the interface should work for this, but it would be an improvement. 'water-flow conjectural' does not show up in plans. I want to show this. It is very hard to tell that you have loaded the wrong thconfig file. Some sensibe error like 'cannot find foo' would help. e.g: My data is in subdir 'bluemoon' load thconfig from dir above (soundriver) load bmb1.th2 from bluemoon dir hit compile - gives 'error' but doesn't show what error. run 'therion' in the bluemoon dir and things are fine (of course). There used to be an entry: "It would be really useful if there was something showing the name of the current scrap", but after using it for best part of two weeks I noticed this was in the title bar! Should be in the tips/FAQ I think so people notice faster. It would be _really_ useful to be able to do graphical joins: click on something and say 'join this to foo'. Difficult to do between two .th2 files, but at least for joins within a .th2 file being able to do them graphically like areas would help a lot (especially if you have to name lines - same automatic naming as areas would help enormously). inserting line points happens _after_ the current point inserting file entries happens _before_ the current line inserting scrap happens at the start of the file this is confusing. inserting after the current position always would be good (then things appear in the file in the order you draw them, not reverse order Difficult to add several points to the end of a line (i.e. carry on a line I accidentally stopped). First new point happens at end but then next point happens one back from end, which is never what I want. Check to tell you you are entering line outside a scrap would be good. Splitting lines that are part of areas is tricky. Does label get removed from both halves of line? Need to be able to find areas and lines better (especially after splitting a line). e.g if I click on an item it is highlyighted, but if it is currently off-screen then there is no clue where it is. maybe double-clicking would move the selected item on-screen? Docs need explanation of 'scrap distortion' numbers. What do they mean? Mine are around 70% - is that as bad as it sounds? Debris rocks look daft on 1:1000 plans. Thye look OK on some of the 1:200 maps martinS showed me. This may be rectifiable by using the base-scale as well as scale options, but I haven't yet got both the rocks and the legend to look sensible. When you insert an area it is always 'water' not the last area you inserted. The line type gets defaulted to whatever you set the area to last time. When you start a line or area and don't add anything to it you end up with an empty entry in the file. It would be smart to tidy these up. What is difference between floor-step and pit? Button for 'invisible', indeed a list of available subtypes in general would be useful. I've found it very easy to mis-spell '-subtype invisible', and having a list would save you needing to know which ones were available. Why do newscraps go in at the top of the file, not bottom of file? This results in scraps being in reverse order in the file. I'd naturaly expect it to be the other way round. After creating the first scrap the cursor is left at a position such that if you enter any lines/points they end up outside a scrap. 0.3.3 keys needed: scroll up/down in side panel (pageup/down?) scroll up/down in file commands window (shift pageup/down?) Shortcut for insert area is needed _very badly_. having to switch between the 'insert area' and 'insert scrap' action is just not good enough as an interface. insert area ctrl-A insert scrap ctrl-S Shortcuts needed to select common types: wall rock-border rock-edge pit floor-step A very useful thing to be able to do would be right-clicking on an item on the map and selecting a point or line type. Making the point type selector taller so that you don't need to page up _twice_ to get from 'wall' to 'border'. some way to select a whole load of lines and move them to a new scrap. bugs: (present since at least 0.3.1 - still in 0.3.5) If entering a line then use ctrl-D to abandon it, one char disappears from current text field (eg pillar becomes illar, contour becomes ontour or cntour (depending on cursor position) prone to crashing - still present in 0.3.5. Need to test with tcltk recompiled without thread support. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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problem with staggered data format
by Wookey 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

I've got a file with data in like this: data normal station ignore ignore ignore ignore newline tape compass clino 1 6 6 20 1 12.6 179 -39 2 4 8 25 2 20.5 266 +04 3 4 4 3 2 # cairn 2 - - - - 22.6 114 -01 4 2 7+ 15 2 16.4 158 0.5 5 4 6 12 2 #cairn 18.3 230 -08 This goes wrong at the line 2 - - - - with the error: therion: error -- terikan/elevator.th [56] -- invalid gradient reading -- - Does the data need reformating to make therion understand or does therion just need fixing? Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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piles of rocks
by Wookey 08 Jan '05

08 Jan '05

I need to understand how to draw largepiles of boulders. This pic: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/1.png shows a chamber which has a 20m-high pile of boulders in it, highest in the middle. I saw in one of Martin Sluka's pics that therion can draw rocks which will obscure rocks lying below - ie they arefilled objects, not just lines. This is good - and more realistic, but it means that the order things are drawn matters. However in the example shown above, the overlying,overlapping rock,does not obscure the one below. So - how do I get the effect Martin S had - what are the rules? * Which order do rocks need to be drawn in? hiest first,or lowest first? * How do I make them obscure lower rocks - just make a rock-bordre that is a closed loop? or something cleverer? thanx Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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