April 2008 - Therion

Re: [Therion] Hopefully a bunch of new users; Optimum Data Managment
by Bruce Mutton 16 Jun '08

16 Jun '08

If I interpret Marco's post regarding data structure description correctly, it seems you have folders for (hope my ascii pictures survive intact) -Cave folder |-'surveys', |-'groups of surveys' and |-'whole cave - collection of the groups' [thconfig file((s) for each output task] all at the same hierarchical level, but able to be stacked up or nested if other caves were to be incorporated into the data set. Seems nice and tidy to me, but the folder hierarchy does not match the conceptual hierarchy of the data, which would be more like Jonathan described, -Region folder |-cave folder |-Surveys |-Notes [scanned notes taken in cave] |-Therion [survey *.th data files] |-Pictures |-Date [pictures taken on this date] I like the concept that the folder hierarchy matches the data hierarchy and especially that it is very cave centric, ie not just Therion data, but all data related to the cave Both the above seem quite tidy, and as Martin has just posted, each user will have their own "cave project circumstances and preferences" Marcos seems to me like it would have many versions of a number of thconfig files. I have found maintaining consistency among many thconfigs to be quite a problem, as I am still learning and refining my opinion of what is a good way to set them out. I am also trying to optimise my system for collaborative data entry and development of the Therion cave dataset, which Therion seems ideally suited to. Therefore the tiny size of the Therion batch files is an advantage I want to keep. So I would adopt Jonathans 'single cave centric' model at once, except I don't want to be emailing back and forth large chunks of non-Therion data amongst the people developing the dataset, nor do I want to have to pick out fiddly bits of non relevant data each time. I have adopted the perhaps the lesser approach of having two parallel folders, one for Therion data and one for non-Therion data such as photos, cave related texts and articles, scanned cave survey notes etc. The Therion folders look something like this; (My thconfig files have the extension .thc - much nicer if using with Windows OS) (and as with the others, highly modular, one survey and very few scraps per file) (and with a fairly highly structured and explicit naming convention so you know what is in a file without peering into it - not really described herein) -Regional folder [RegionINDEX.th contains very simple equates and 'maps', Single Region.thc contains layouts and all exports for region wide outputs] |-common folder [layoutSTANDARD.thc, club logos and graphics common to all layouts] |-outputs folder [all output files go here] |-surface folder [overlandsurveys.th, overlandINDEX.th, surfaceINDEX.th, surface.jpg] |-cave1 folder [surveys.th contains centrelines & maps relating to associated scraps, caveAElev290.th2 contains scraps generally relating to survey A, caveINDEX.th containing entrance co-ords; equates; joins and maps, single cave1.thc contains layouts and all exports for cave1 wide outputs, and if there is no actual survey data, caveplan.jpg - a picture of an old fashioned cave plan for which there is no data] |-sketches [sketchAElev290.jpg containing sketches for scraps relating to this cave.] |-cave2 folder [caveINDEX.th contains very simple equates and 'maps', Single cave2.thc contains layouts and all exports for cave2 wide outputs |-group21 folder [same as for cave1 folder above] |-sketches [sketchAElev290.jpg containing sketches for scraps relating to this cave group or branch.] |-group22 folder [same as for cave1 folder above] |-sketches [as above.] Cave1 is a simple cave a few km long perhaps; cave2 might have many km or distinct 'branches'. This is perhaps flatter than Jonathans, but still hierarchical. Has few thconfig files, one per 'family' of passages 'selected' for output and one 'singlesurveytest.thc per cave, to enable frequent and quick checking of survey and sketch data as it is being entered (and still they drive me crazy). The common, outputs and surface folders live at the top level and do not need to be shared (often) among users. The cave data folders can easily be zipped without the sketches and shared by email. This is working well informally with two users, but would require good discipline and record keeping with more simultaneous users. I plan to keep single thconfig files for exporting all outputs, but break them up into referenced modules according to function; ie layoutMapPlan.thc, layoutMapElevation290.thc, layoutAtlasPlan.thc, etc. This might make them easier to manage. We don't do splay legs (well, perhaps one or two for every 100 survey legs, or if the passage is 20m wide and the surveyors' fussy) so I don't make a distinction for them. I have yet to deal with significant levels of the cave which over/under-lie each other, but I will have to come to grips with it shortly. I am hoping my structure above will work well in this scenario. I will heed Martins sage advice quoted below. "The main principle is that the map itself is divided into small pieces - scraps. The scraps are absolutely independent from survey structure created more or less historically. You may use in one scrap data from several surveys made historically in very long interval by different surveyors. Only condition is all the data are accessible in survey which include the map structure with that particular scrap. The main rules to create such structure is to divide the system into horizontal layers (in case of map) which the atlas will be able to recognize and shows in enough simple way. There one may see the importance of idea of scraps -you may reorganize your structure anytime in the future. The main problem is organize the maps and submaps. The structure of survey data itself is existing more or less automatically." Any other insights or ways of setting out the data appreciated. Bruce

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Hopefully a bunch of new users
by Bruce Mutton 29 Apr '08

29 Apr '08

I demonstrated Therion to our local caving club a couple of days ago, and there are a few keen hopefuls and I suspect a lot of stunned cavers (hope I wasn't too boring) Hopefully we get some new users out of it. Bruce Mutton

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Therion Being Discussed on Cavechat.org
by Jonathan Prouty 27 Apr '08

27 Apr '08

Therion came up in a thread on cavechat. Some good points were brought up that are beyond my ability to respond to. I figured someone more knowledgeable than me might like to respond. A lot of people read cavechat and it would be a shame to scare people away from therion for no good reason. http://forums.caves.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=6757&p=55739 -- -Jonny ^v^

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new beta release 0.5.2
by Gilbert Fernandes (mailinglist) 24 Apr '08

24 Apr '08

hello, I noticed you prepared a new beta release of therion. I download and tried the windows delivery. I noticed that the bug on the 3 D view (tool loch) for the pit view is still present. I sent you and email a few month ago with an exemple (the data put in the survey giving the dept or hight value in a vertical survey (a pit) is used in the 3D modele as the width of the pit. So the pit seems always to be very large at the top and at his bottom). An other problem I noticed in the release 0.5.1 (but not test in the beta) his : for the loch tool, on a Linux computer (Ubuntu), with a 3D view (the same data used on windows), I can't have a color of the galery by deep. Colors are random. But the colors are good in the Windows release. Do you know this problem ? Will you solve these problems on the final 0.5.2 delivery or later ? Thanks, Gilbert

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labelling grids
by Bruce Mutton 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

Further to the posting below, I'm just wondering if there are any updates on the ability to label co-ordinate grids with the northings and eastings at the edge of each sheet (map and or atlas). (I have modified the grids to be displayed as continuous lines.) Bruce From: Martin Budaj <m.b <at> speleo.sk> Subject: Re: labelling the grid <http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3c20050823062815.M68068%40s peleo.sk%3e> Newsgroups: gmane.comp.gis.therion <http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.therion> Date: 2005-08-23 06:33:00 GMT (2 years, 27 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours and 56 minutes ago) On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:06:31 +0100, Wookey wrote > Can I make therion put numbers on the edges of the grid to match the > co-ordinates used in the dataset? Unfortunately, not yet. It's somewhere in to-do list. . Martin

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User Interface TO DO List Request
by Bruce Mutton 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

A few items for consideration for the user interface. COMPILER WINDOW 1. Add 'search & replace', similar to the other windows. (Disrupts work flow to open config files in the text editor each time.) 2. Allow the split pane bar to move up and down the window. The editing area is usually too small. As a compromise, having an upper, middle and lower position would be a great help. ALL THREE WINDOWS 3. Add two buttons (or menu or key combinations), -one to comment out the selected block of text (add # to the start of each line), and -one to uncomment the selected block of text (remove the first non-space or non-tab character from the start of each line, provided it is a #) 4. In the case of the MAP EDITOR the actions would be. -Comment out the selected object, and -Uncomment the selected object This would allow temporary hiding of an object without having to delete it and completely redraw it (or find it's code in the data file and copy it elsewhere for safe keeping) Comments? Regards Bruce

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cave-list?
by Bruce Mutton 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

I noticed an export item 'cave-list', however I get empty output files. I can not find much explanation of this (new?) feature. I have three caves with survey data entered, and a number of scraps, and one cave entered as a scan of a plan view of an old cave map (no survey data, but two dummy stations with co-ordinates entered) Two of the surveyed caves are connected by survey centrelines, and one is not (but will be when finished entering data) One of the stations for each cave contains a line similar to; station N2 "Greenlink Entrance" attr entrance and my thconfig file both for an individual cave, and for the system of all four caves, contains something like; export cave-list -output ../Outputs/Greenlinkcaves.txt\ -location on Alas I always get empty outputs. What data should be entered to obtain output? What information is output? Thanks Bruce PS I like the new look Therion Book, new behaviour of layout-comment, how Therion now tidies up it's temporary files and the warning highlight in the Compiler with the new 2008.04.16 snapshot. Good work!

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Surface image obscures cave plan image
by Bruce Mutton 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

I've tried to export a pdf with a scanned cave plan image overlying a scanned surface image. I can get one or the other but not both. I can get surveyed and 'scrapped' drawings to overlie scanned surface images. I have used the following statement in my layouts; surface-opacity 10 # tried values from 10 to 70 surface bottom #top/bottom/off What I have found is that the opacity affects both the surface image and the cave plan image, with the effect that the surface always obliterates cave image. I can live with this, but am interested if there is a work around. Bruce

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Surface woes
by Bruce Mutton 18 Apr '08

18 Apr '08

Have just had some partial success at adding a surface to my outputs. I have cave data, georeferenced to the same co-ordinate system as that below, that covers at present 1km x 1km in plan, but I expect to add other systems to extend this area. I have cropped a jpg topo map image to an area 3km x 3km I am exporting at 1:1000 to pdf (900mmx1012mm) I have labelled grids at 100m centres on the cave map, so I know from observing the output that the grids and the cave are correctly georeferenced. Trouble is the jpg seems to be "zoomed in" many times too much. My *.th data as follows; survey. surface #Canaan Road South Topo cs EPSG:27200 #NZ Map Grid 1949 bitmap ./Surface/Canaan_South_Topo_NZMG_990210_020240.jpg \ [0 0 2499000 6021000 100 100 2502000 6024000] grid-units meter # grid <origin x> <origin y> <x spacing> <y spacing> <x count> <y count> # grid-flip (none)/vertical/horizontal # [grid data] endsurface . endsurvey I have tried reducing the co-ords to the NE corner of the image, and seem to get a more legible, bur still erroneous, surface image. Makes me suspect I'm exceeding some software limits and there's an unreported error, or that I'm just making a dumb mistake. A possibly related matter, I have had "sketches on" (no quote marks) in my layout since my first (almost) Therion steps last year, and not once have I had my jpg sketches exported to pdf. I expect they should, and I recall that the samples provided seem to do so - I could find no difference between my code and the samples. Any ideas on these two issues? (surfaces most importantly) Also the above code does not produce a 3D lox model. Is that because a surface is either 2D or 3D but not both? It would be nice to have at least a 2D image above my lox model until I can get a grillage of elevations sorted. Regards Bruce

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Sketches Export -sketch option missing from th2
by Bruce Mutton 17 Apr '08

17 Apr '08

A while back I asked I have had "sketches on" (no quote marks) in my layout since my first (almost) Therion steps last year, and not once have I had my jpg sketches exported to pdf. I expect they should, and I recall that the samples provided seem to do so - I could find no difference between my code and the samples. Stacho replied Do you have -sketch option specified in your scrap? It does not work automatically. In the scrap toolbar - last list box is background sketches. You need to click insert button below and then click on the appropriate picture. Then this picture should be listed in the "background sketches" listbox. Background images in xtherion are not seen by therion, you need to enable this manually. And I replied with what I now realize is nonsense so I won't repeat it. And now I've given this some more time I still have the problem that sketches are not exported, but I have some insight as to why. . Stacho's response above is consistent with the Therion book pg 20 and 32 explanations, and on studying the morphing sample code that comes with the installation, I think that I have been, and still are, following the instructions for the required actions within the map editor perfectly. (and I can see and trace my sketches as expected) However on studying the text files produced by my map editor efforts, and those in the morphing sample I see that the -sketch option is missing from my *.th2 files. >From the Therion book. sketch <filename> <x> <y> . underlying sketch bitmap specification (lower left corner coordinates). So in theory I could manually add this option using the text editor, but there is a difficulty calculating the x, y co-ordinates. I suppose it could be done by hand or by trial and error, but very time consuming. Am I missing something, or is there something my map editor is not translating correctly? Bruce

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