> I have an update to share regarding wtherion, which you hopefully remember is my project for a web-based Therion map editor to replace XTherion's map editing capabilities:

> The scope of the project hasn't really changed, but I'd be interested to work on other projects that plan to replace the whole of XTherion, or even replace text based editing.

Good to see that this project is continuing. It would be nice to have a more capable editor for Therion drawings.

Unfortunately I have not had time to look at this update, but hope to do so at some stage.

Just a comment regarding the value or otherwise of text-based data files in relation to Therion.

For me a super-power of Therion/XTherion is the ability to support multiple simultaneous people editing a dataset at one time, and the ability to interrogate every saved snapshot for the entire history of a project (for error tracking and recovery, finding bugs). Of course these capabilities are not built into Therion/XTherion, but my understanding is that they are, by way of version control (Git, bzr, Hg) only possible because:

of the text (ascii) based data (.th, .th2) files and
a single edit in the drawing editor results in ONLY a single line changed in the data (.th2) file.

The earlier implementation of WTherion had two characteristics that made it unsuitable for the ecosystem that I have built up around my Therion usage:

a .th2 file loaded into WTherion, saved without making any changes and exported back to .th2 resulted in a file that had edits on every line. ie it violated the above requirement that a single entity edit results in a single line change in the data file, making it ‘unhelpful’ for version control (particularly if some are using XTherion and some are using WTherion), and
the WTherion data files ‘live’ in a browser cache (I think something like that) so that a project’s data is no longer stored as a package in a single location version control. Therefore other users and version control cannot identify when changes have been made to a project, unless all users are always rigorous about carrying out the extra steps required to export WTherion data back to the project folder.

I think line point characteristics such as ‘altitude .’ and possibly others that I have grwn fond of were not possible in WTherion.

I appreciate WTherion is just starting out, and am hoping that if multi-user editing and version control compatibility are front of mind during development they can be accommodated.

I think that retaining the paradigm where drawing is interactive and compilation of outputs is a batch operation is optimal, so don’t see a particular need to move to more efficient non-text data formats. This is right outside of my expertise, and I’m an old dinosaur, so will no doubt stand corrected.

An editor where I could cut, paste, rotate and scale drawing entities would be a nice addition to the Therion ecosystem, so keep working on it!

Thanks

Bruce