- Therion - speleo.sk

labelling the grid
by Wookey 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

Can I make therion put numbers on the edges of the grid to match the co-ordinates used in the dataset? I see various things about grid and page-grid but don't see how to get numbers at the edge of the sheet saying what northing/easting the grid-lines represent. Also I don't fully understand the distinction between grid and page-grid, except that 'grid' shows intersection crosses and 'page-grid' draws full squares - is one aligned with the page, and the other with the co-ordinate system? The thbook could expand upon this point I feel. What I really want is a fullly-drawn grid, aligned with the dataset, and the number the line represents printed at the edge of the page (map), each page (atlas). My current layout is: grid bottom grid-size 200 200 200 m 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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Problems with areas
by Wookey 19 Aug '05

19 Aug '05

The area control is better than it used to be, but is still a major pain in the arse. I have put very few areas in the Terikan survey because I know they cause trouble. I've just tried putting some in and it was a rather frustrating experience. I'll detail the problems I had so we can decide how to make things more user-friendly. First one question - what to do about areas which join across scraps? Obviously we try to avoid areas which cross scrap joins but cannot always do so. Other considerations like altitude colouring make it difficult, and in a cave which has a lot of mud or water we could find that most scrap joins have areas crossing them. Currently if an area crosses a scrap join we just put an area either side - one in each scrap. This needs a 'border -subtype invisible' line across the passage at the join on _both_ scraps - these lines are directly on top of each other. The problem here is that you can't click on the line which is 'below' so you can't complete one of the areas without first moving the top line to the side temporarily. This is clearly not satisfactory. Is there a better way? If not then selecting the new scrap should move the border line to the 'top' for the purpose of clicking. There is also a big problem with line id's disappearing. I find I sometimes need to split a line (e.g. a very long wall, or a wall passing behind a feature that I want to include in the area boundary (e.g. a mudbank) (if the wall has the same id either side of the mudbank then the mudbank tends to get ignored when setting the area outline). The problem is that if a line has been used in another area anywhere, then splitting it loses the id and breaks the area. When this happens I get an error saying 'id does not exist at line nnnn', but I can see no way to find the offending area in the map editor. I have to find it in the text editor, then try to work out where it is in the map editor, and having both open at once leads to the usual problem of which changes end up getting saved last. Ultimately, so far as the user is concerned id's that have been used shouldn't 'disappear' unless the line is deleted. Obviously there is a problem of knowing which id to use when a line is split but xtherion could probably make a good guess... One other comment - the 'show area' button is useful but it only seems to show 'border' lines, not walls or contours, so it's difficult to know whether an area is broken or not. Bit of a whinge that, sorry - I've just had a rather frustrating hour. Thought it was best to record the problems before I forget. 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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Scale and Base-scale and font sizes
by Wookey 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

I used to have scale 1 2000 base-scale 1 1000 in my layout. That worked OK, but the symbols were very small and the text was microscopic. So I added code metapost fonts_setup(10,16,20,24,28) And that made the text a sensible size. I just changed base scale to read base-scale 1 2000 which makes the symbols a much more sensible size, but makes the text too big. My understanding of these two values is that scale sets the scale of the output (i.e how big the final PDF sheet is in map mode, or how many sheets in atlas mode) , whilst base-scale 'has the same effect as if the map printed in base-scale would be photreduced to the scale' (quote from thbook) But if it was photoreduced then the fonts and symbol size shouldn't change. So I am confused about how this should work. When would I ever want scale and base-scale to be different? Why does changing base-scale effect the size of symbols and text? On a related point I tried doing an atlas version with the defaults (i.e. 1:200) and get loads of 'number too big errors' from metafont. I can see why such a scale is a problem in map mode (page larger than PDF can manage), but in atlas mode the page size is limited to A4 (or whatever) - so why can I not print an atlas (with a lot of sheets) showing the system in high detail? Is it a fundamental problem of the way the PDFs are generated or can it be fixed? 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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Feedback on 0.3.8 - queries
by Wookey 17 Aug '05

17 Aug '05

OK, and here are some queries I have: You can see the survey these problems refer to here: http://wookware.org/mulu/ terikanaltitudecolour.pdf is the latest, but scrap-coloured (terikanmapcolour.pdf) and grey-shaded (terikan.pdf) versions exist too. I'll put the corresponding therion and survex dataset files there too. 1) Is there a dripline symbol for the entrance extent? Do I use 'overhang'? I tried using overhang and nothing appears (because it is outside the clipped area?) Should I use overhang and add a -outline out option? 2) How can I represent a surface cliff line between a series of caves? I have a lot of cave entrances with a defined cliffline between them. the survey makes a lot more sense if this surface feature can be seen. How can I draw a line on to represent this? 3)What to do when entrance line draws scrap end across to the wrong point (e.g. deception entrance?) In the bottom LH corner of the survey above is 'Deception Cave'. If you look at '1st entrance' you will see the problem I mean. Therion has decided to ignore the last bit of wall and just draw a line across the gap between the nearest points. How do I make a wide, flared entrance like this have the 'correct' entrance area? This may be related to question 1. 4) How is length in legend calculated when data is imported from .3d file? The survey above consists of a lot of scraps round real data and a lot round 'fake' data made from surveys which are nothing but drawings scaled with the scale bar or a few nearby or fake survey stations. The survex .3d file used includes survex data for the whole mountain including another 50km of cave or so. So where is the number in the legend coming from? 5) How do I get rid of the 'dummy' survey surrounding all my data which means the title of the whole thing is 'dummy'. I may have been told this before in which case I apologise for forgetting the answer. 6) When is a label under passage and when over? As you can see I have some of both in this survey. Is it to do with the ordering of walls and labels within the scrap? Or maybe there is an 'ontop' option? I have a couple of more complex queries, but will put those in their own thread. TIA 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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Wishlist - scrap preview, low-res preview
by Wookey 16 Aug '05

16 Aug '05

The interface needs a better way of previewing scrap names so one can join up a lot of scraps without having to slowly open each file and click about. Being able to see a scrap number somehow without selecting the scrap would also be useful. At the moment if editing a .th2 file to put in joins one needs to close current scrap and open new one, then click on correct part to find out which bit is which. Not sure how best to deal with this problem. Maybe showing scrap-names in the debug ouput would be sufficient. Or a separate low-res output with scraps coloured differently and labelled? The 'without pics' option helps somewhat here, but what I really need is some kind of low-res scrap overview. There is a related problem that the 1.5Mb PDF file now takes at least 2 minutes to render on my 900Mhz laptop. Having some kind of low-res ouput would be generally useful for checking that joins have worked and caves have appeared would be very handy - is that at all practical? I'm not sure where all the time goes. 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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questions on therion
by Wolfgang Zillig 16 Aug '05

16 Aug '05

Hello, I'm not really using therion yet (there were always other people who draw the caves ;-) but that will change propably. a) I try to get an overlay of the centreline on a scanned topographical map but I always get an error ( test.th [47] -- number expected -- end) but I don't know where to insert more numbers examplecode: surface bitmap ur.png [1 11 211065.0 2139614.0 6310 4474 237623.0 2158455.0 meters] grid-units meters grid 211000.0 2139000.0 20000.0 15000.0 2 2 10.0 10.0 10.0 10.0 end surface b) at loops: is the standard error for the measurement devices included when the loops are closed? IE when more than one GPS measurements (with high errors are used to fix the cave)? Thanks for any help Wolfgang

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changed thconfig files not noticed
by Wookey 12 Aug '05

12 Aug '05

Therion now notices if you have edited a file externmally and asks what do about it. However this doesn't seem to work for thconfig files. If I have an xtherion open (and have processed data so it has a thconfig file open/referenced) then if I edit a thconfig file externally, then hit F9 again to reprocess - the thconfig in xtherion overwrites the modified thconfig on disk. It would be nice if xtherion noticed the changed thconfig file and used that, or at least asked before overwriting the modified one. (this is with 0.3.8) 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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PDF viewing comments
by Wookey 10 Aug '05

10 Aug '05

I have noticed that waterflow -subtype presumed symbols in the 'Blue Moonlight bay' area (top right hand corner). Appears fine in xpdf, but not at all in gpdf. Do they come out in acrobat? What is going on here? Someone else remarked that it was nice to have layers appear as 'bookmarks' and that acrobat could do this. It would be nice to have each 'map' appear in the 'bookmarks' list (so you could easily move to it) and maybe be a separate PDF 'layer'. I know almost nothing about PDF and maybe this is a bad idea, but I pass it on in case it is helpful. 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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Wishlist - colouring control improvements
by Wookey 10 Aug '05

10 Aug '05

I discivered the colouring features because Jenny Black used them, and they hare in one of the example files. Very nice indeed. But of course I am not satisfied with what I am given :-) Colour scrap by altitude is nice but the abrubt joins can look nasty in the middle of wide, nominally horizontal passage. It works really well in the 'soundriver' area where there are nicely-merging shades of green, but nastily in other some other areas. Some way to graduate the join a bit would make it look a lot nicer. Or apply more detailed colour control to a scrap like 'nearly the same as neighbour scrapname'. Also my users have complained that the colours are 'too random and garish' and I am inclined to agree. They like the depth colouring in Aven, so could we try to use the same gradient colours? Probably what is really needed is a way to specify the colour set/gradient, and proably a way to specify it for individula scraps too. Perhaps I already can? In colour by map there should be some way to allocate colours to maps. This is particularly necessary where you have sloping levels - you would want to make one level one colour but the altitude will vary a lot. Making one level into one map should fix this, but I would want to be able to set the colours for a level. At the moment if you add a new map suddenly the colours will all change round - this would be a problem when doing an update for next year, when users might expect caves (maps) to retain old colours. I think the colouring is a major step forward, but some more detailed control is needed. There are a lot of ways this could be done and input for others is welcome. Also having blue water would make a lot of sense for water areas, streamflow arrows etc. 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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Feedback on 0.3.8 - bugs
by Wookey 10 Aug '05

10 Aug '05

OK, I have been having another big bout of therion use. This has generated a few bugs, some observations for improvements and some more queries. I'll split these up into a few messages to avoid one huge list. The result so far is a 30km system in one plan which may be one of the largest therion maps drawn so far? A new expedition is going in 3 weeks so there is a lot of things I need to sort out before they go. Your help will be appreciated as ever - I hope everyone isn't on holiday.... OK. lets start with a few bugs, which are not major but should be fixed (I understand why some of these things are happening and that they may be hard to fix but I am just being a 'user' here - these things need to be improved somehow to make therion useable by non-geeks): 1) If you split a line the view moves to be centered on the previous/next line in the list (not sure which), whilst the selection moves to one half of the line. Sometimes this means the view moves so you can't see the selected line. The view should move to the line that is now selected (one half or the other of the split line). 2) If you try to open a new image it asks you to create a .th2 file first presenting "(new file)" as the file name. If you exit without choosing one (cancel) then when you close the file in the map window it asks if you want to save "blah/blah/(new file)". A blank white square also appears in place of the image you didn't load. It should remain in the state it was before you tried to load an image. 3) If you run out of disk space while Therion is processing then therion-in-xtherion just blanks the log window and says 'error' - no way to find out what error without runninng therion in raw terminal mode. There it gives: This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.14159-1.10b-2.1 (Web2C 7.4.5) entering extended mode (./data.tex{/usr/share/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg} (./th_enc.tex) (./th_texts.tex) (./th_resources.tex) (./th_fontdef.tex) (./th_formdef.texpdfetex: data: No space left on device therion: error -- pdftex exit code -- 256 The 'No space left on device' should appear in the processing window (or some other way of working out what went wrong). 4) 'Sort of bug' (english language bug rather than computer language): There is a 'vtreshold' option. This makes no sense and presumably should be 'vthreshold' as it refers to a threshold value. The thbook explanation should have the spelling changed too. 5) tcl/tk problem: If you maximise a window then swap to 'F2' window the menus disappear (I think they may be 'under' the window title bar). They can be brought back by un-maximising the window. This is using icewm window manager under Debian GNU/Linux and has been present for many versions. I suppose I should try it with another window manager and see what happens. 6) Wish/xtherion still hangs regularly so I have to kill it. I save after every line (and _during_ long lines(!)) or boulder drawn to avoid losing a lot of work. Very tiresome. No pattern to it at all - sometime minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days, doing various things. I don't know if it happens outside xtherion as I don't use anything else tcl/tk for hours on end. I tried running xtherion under strace a couple of times and caught the point where it hangs. I don't know if this is a clue. It seemed to crash faster when running under strace, and the output suggests that it is some kind of threading problem, perhaps in the underlying tcl/tk implementation? This time it crashed whilst I was using another window (the only time I have seen that - normally it only crashes when I am using xtherion - presumably the presence of strace caused this). This is the last 30 lines or so of output: futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, {1123365892, 37854000}) = 0 futex(0x88b3590, FUTEX_WAIT, 12826, {0, 17829000}) = 0 futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 0 gettimeofday({1123365892, 44121}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 ioctl(5, FIONREAD, [32]) = 0 read(5, "\6\0\216\2306@!\26@\0\0\0\30\0\340\0\0\0\0\0\21\2\223\1"..., 32) = 32 write(4, "\0", 1) = 1 futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 futex(0x88b3580, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 futex(0x88b3590, FUTEX_WAIT, 12828, NULL) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable) futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 0 gettimeofday({1123365892, 53678}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 write(5, "5\30\4\0.\2\340\0b\1\340\0o\0\24\0F\0\5\0.\2\340\0\2\0"..., 200) = 200 gettimeofday({1123365892, 54293}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 write(4, "\0", 1) = 1 gettimeofday({1123365892, 54442}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 futex(0x88b3580, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, {1123365892, 55967000}) = 0 futex(0x88b3580, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 0 futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 0 gettimeofday({1123365892, 56132}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 ioctl(5, FIONREAD, [32]) = 0 read(5, "\16\0\227\230b\1\340\0\0\0>\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0.\2\340\0"..., 32) = 32 gettimeofday({1123365892, 56372}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 gettimeofday({1123365892, 58108}, {4294967236, 0}) = 0 write(4, "\0", 1) = 1 futex(0x804a8c0, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 futex(0x88b3580, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 1 futex(0x88b3590, FUTEX_WAIT, 12831, NULL Clearly it is getting stuck on a futex that never exits/returns/is released. Any suggestions as to what I should ask to try and get to the bottom of this are welcome. perhaps some other tcl/tk test I could run? 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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