>Any guesses as to which symbol-show (or other statement) directly effects the + part of the point symbol, as I would like to show them in both cases?

I have figured this one out.

One might expect the two statements…

  symbol-show point surface-station

  symbol-show point cave-station

to have an identical net effect the same as…

  symbol-show point station

but they do not.  It seems like ‘point station’ is the ‘+’ part of the station symbol, and ‘point surface-station’ is the special flag dependant part of the station symbol (like the entrance or doline or sink or continuation or arch symbols) and the text label.  Not quite sure what unique attribute the ‘point cave-station’ might add – maybe the short stubby legs that point in the direction of the survey leg(?)

So to get more complete information about the points to output to pdf, you need to include all three statements (assuming there is a ‘symbol-hide group all’ somewhere in your layout).

At least I think it is something like this.

I still have not figured out if the text associated with a surface point can be output if the point has no flags set.

Bruce