- Therion - speleo.sk

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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Help - my cave is inside-out
by Wookey 08 Jan '05

08 Jan '05

Hi guys, Lots of notes here on things I found and suggestions for improvements, but the important one first: I'm getting the hang of this and have drawn up some cave. It went OK until I got to a complicated section, with an underlying streamway adn overlying passages. The streamway needs to be a separate scrap. But I haven't got that far. One bit of wall wasn't shown. By adding a map-fg colour I could see that therion is very confused about what is the inside and what is the outside of the scrap. Here is the set of files needed to process this example: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.tgz including the offending background image. You can see from the included pdf (also here: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.pdf what the problem is. I;ve tried reversing some lines and reading the thbook, but I don;t know how to fix this. Does it in fact need to be split up into smaller, simpler scraps? why? I am hesitant to use smaller scraps on this drawing because none of the joins work when I just do join scrap1 scrap2 - it joins lines to the wrong places. I have to use explicit line ID's, which is really tedious - add line in map editor then add then to join command in text editor. Being able to graphically describe joins (at letsfor joins within one .th2 file) would be a really useful improvement. I'll send a separate mail for my other notes. 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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Importing surveys with no data
by Wookey 31 Dec '04

31 Dec '04

We have a number of pre-1990 surveys in mulu for which all the centreline data has been lost but we still have the drawn up surveys. We have regenerated centreline data by inventing survey stations and legs and working out XYZ coordinates for them (very laboriously)2, but now I am putting these surveys into Therion. At the moment I am using the XYZ base survey data and putting in stations for these on the plan. However the positions of these stations on the drawing are very aproximate (I don't actually have the original plot showing exactly where the made-up stations are - one can just just guess from the look of the survey). But this introduces errors of approx the width of the passage, which can be several meters, and is adding distortion to the drawings I am putting in. I am wondering if there is a better way - so I put the drawings in and say 'these are all we have - you work it out', rather than using ill-defined stations which were only made up by taking off this very same drawing in the first place but now they have been through numerous innacuracies and distortions. Can therion do this? And how would I work out the scaling? Can I use a scale bar or something and just copy the scale into each scrap? 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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debug mode
by Wookey 29 Dec '04

29 Dec '04

OK - I turned 'debug on' in layout and now I get pretty images like this: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.pdf I can see that the black linesare the final result and the red lines are the initial positions of the scrap walls, but what do the yellow lines/triangles indicate. It looks like distortions or distortions at joins? As you can see something has gone badly wrong in the upper centre of this image - I'm just trying to work out what... Also - as you can see on that pdf I am not getting any transparency on overlaying passages (despite having 'transparency on', 'opacity 50'). How do I fix that? or is it just that my viewer (xpdf) can't do it and it is just output into the PDF? 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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arranging files and surveys
by Wookey 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

I'm a bit lost about how files scraps and surveys should relate. Therion encourages drawing s complex junction chamber as one scrap, but that tends to mean that one scrap now has stations fromseveral surveys in it. How shold these be labelled and where in the hierarchy should the files be 'input'? In general scrapsdon't match to surveys very well at all, but if you don't incldue a .th2 file in the .th file within a survey/endsurvey pair then presumably the station labels need full names not just numbers? I'm not sure when I start drawing whether it will all be one survey so I can just use numbers or if it will be several surveys and I'll need to use full names - and it's a paid to go back afterwards and change them. What is the recommended way to deal with scrap/survey mismatches? Do you have a file for each scrap, put all scraps inthe samesurvye in one file? etc. I've got a huge cave and I'm going to get in a mess over this if I don't have a sensible structure. Suggestions welcome. And I see therion now gives scraps names automatically, based on the item-number, so you get scraps 1, 36, 90, 109 in your file. I think it would be better if it named the scraps 1, 2, 3, 4 - I'd find that less confusing. 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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No x-size for pillar?
by Wookey 20 Dec '04

20 Dec '04

I just got the error -x-size not valid with type pillar I have a passage with a load of pillars in it here - of varying size and width. I don't want 27 identical pillars - so orientation, and X and Y sizes are important to make it look realistic (some are huge) and not computer-drawn. Can we update therion to draw an ellipse for the pillar according to the x, y and orientation values, or at least accept them quietly for the time being? 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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Therion Wiki pages
by Martin Budaj 20 Dec '04

20 Dec '04

Hello all, with the help of Lada Blazek we added Wiki pages to Therion homepage (therion.speleo.sk/wiki.php). You may edit them, ask questions, answer them, contribute examples, translate the documentation or whatever is missing on the official pages. Cheers, Martin

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Therion hangs occaisionally
by Wookey 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

I've had therion 0.3.3 hang on me twice this evening. It's very annoying if you have just drawn a load of cave... The second time I was editing a line. I tried sending it (wish) a HUP but that just closed it. Not sure what can be done about this apart from saving often, but thought I should report it. 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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