Andrew Atkinson wrote:
Well, most of the people find it too difficult :)
It does make my head hurt.
Therion in the beginning was only experiment and we wanted just to draw a simple map of our complicated 19km cave system. There are a lot of things, that could be designed simplier, but it is too late... :(
PS Any chance of some more fills or control of the density, you can hardly see the sand and debris fill. (on the attached pdf you can only see the sand when you zoom in)
This is a serious BUG, we have discovered 2 weeks ago. It will be certainly fixed in next release.
Also would it be possible to fill passages with small rocks and medium rocks. Mud would be useful too.
With area we have one problem, that is still not solved. Metapost is not able to tell us, whether specific point lies inside or outside a clipping region. When drawing rocks, it will look terrible, if a rock would be clipped by invisible border in the middle. In any case, soon I will probably add those missing area symbols - blocks, snow, ice and mud, but I am afraid, blocks will not look nice. One question, what is the difference between mud and clay? clay = mud without water? Should it mean the same, or not?
My ideal solution would be to pick an area an then use an option like -medium_rock 30 -small_rock 50 and this would mix the 2 fills in these percentages leaving the other 20 percent (in this case) empty. While I am on the thought process, I would really like to be able to define a graded change from say rocks to sand, possibly by putting a straight line though an area labelling on end -small_rocks 100 and the other end -sand 100 and the fill would slowly grade.
:) Even it looks crazy, this can be a solution. If a rocks, debris, sand or other clastic sediments (mud) would be randomly drawn around a line (like it is done in tunnel). There would be no problem with clipping and it is possible to do also gradient changes (probably...)
Terrible isn't it you spend all your time writing a wonderful program and all I do is ask for more. All I can say is thanks again, one day I may see you to buy you a drink.
Until now, we were not using areas et all. Our primary target was to have a map, which will be allways up-to-date and there will be all information. For passage fills, we used only point symbols - because those rocks are usually drawn randomly also in the survey notes. Therefore if passage is full of rocks or there is one symbol, that means that passage is full of rocks, it is the same information. The second approach is more easier to implement and read in a map, the first looks nicer (sometimes :) . Fills around the line could solve this problem, but it will definitely need some time. It will not be trivial to implement, and I am currently more focused on 3D modelling, which I am missing much more... Regards, S. P.S. I Cc-ed this message to therion conference, may be some other users will write some useful remarks...