Luc le Blanc: Hi, I'm currently implementing an export feature in Auriga to allow exporting cave data to files on the memory card in various native survey formats. Survex is among them, along with Compass, Therion, Toporobot, VisualTopo, Walls and plain-text CSV. I hope to ship this in October. I just started that less than a month ago, so it's been a quick intro to various formats. Here are a few observations regarding Survex. As I already told the Therion people (whose data format draws heavily on Survex's), if the backsight compass and clino can have their own units, they should also have their own calibration. And it makes much sense: if you take backsights, it's better to take them at the same time you take foresights in order to compare them and repeat as necessary until they agree, so you do need two sets of instruments, each with their own calibration. I'm told a future Survex version will support splay measures taken from a station to some non-station cave feature. It's a good thing as they are a wonderful help for sketching, akin to drawing by numbers :) Auriga implements them as additional measures hooked to regular survey shots (like additional LRUDs, but with a heading and slope), others, like Therion or Walls, support them as plain survey shots, albeit with a fake "to" station. Therion distinguishes between a splay shot to a wall/floor/ceiling and one to some cave feature while Auriga distinguishes between a splay measure to a wall, to the floor/ceiling or to some cave feature (the wall vs floor/ceiling distinction is much arbitrary but helps deciding which to pick to draw outlines in top view or profiles) Given that software evolves and new versions support new features, I'm surprised only one PC software (Visual Topo) implements a version number in its data format. Wouldn't it make sense that when new features are met by an old software version, it has the ability to tell the user this version is outdated? Regards, -- Luc Le Blanc http://www.speleo.qc.ca/Auriga