[Therion] Paperless Cave Survey with DistoX, PocketTopo and Therion

[Footleg]

2010/2/1 Martin Lüthi <luethi at vaw.baug.ethz.ch>:
>
> Thanks for your message. If I understand correctly, you use the text export
> from PocketTopo (the therion export?) and convert that to survex shots. This
> is obviously pretty trivial, and I have written a 10 line python code doing
> exactly that.

Yes, all I am doing is interpreting the plain text data export file.
It is a pretty trivial problem for simple files, although it can
become a little more complex when you have multiple trips and survey
series entered in the one cave file. My tool was written primarily to
help non-software developer cavers to get their data out quickly after
trips to insert into the master project. If you are able to write
python scripts you could easily do the equivalent task.

> I am more interested to read the *.top files (the original PocketTopo files)
> directly. Do you have code for that? Or at least a description of that binary
> format? The *.top format seems to be somewhat more convoluted than most binary
> formats, so it is not even easy to guess how to access that data.

Unfortunately I have no information about the .top file format. I just
wrote my converter from manual inspection of the text export format
and subsequent debugging each time we encounter a file which it does
not handle correctly.

With your python scripts watch out for the issue I did not spot at
first when averaging three bearings when they are spread either side
of zero (e.g. 359.9, 0.1, 0.0 should average to 0.0, and not 180! )

Footleg