[Therion] Magazine printing of surveys from Therion

[Andrew Atkinson]

Hi

We are trying to send our Charterhouse survey to Descent for 
publication. Chris Howes, the editor, would love to have an output he 
can use directly, but as yet this is not to be.

Over a series of emails here are some of the points that he has made. I 
hope I have not taken them out of context in editing them down to a 
single email. (I also accept some of the comments may come from the fact 
I do not understand some of the features of Therion or some of the 
terminology) Hope this is useful for future development


1
My problem was that if I'm using colour on a page, I often use a tinted
background and/or run bits of survey across a photo corner or something 
(or even over a graphic) as part of my layout. But if there is 
transparency in the fill, I can't do that. What's needed is for no 
transparency to be used in 'normal' fills = all passages, but instead a 
solid colour. For overlying bits, transparency is fine for the upper 
section, but not the lower.

Transparency for all 'non cave' bits = the background *should* be
transparent of course.

2
Another oddity - there seemed to be a lot of non-stroked detail/bits way off
the passages/survey that don't show up but are selectable. Doesn't seem to
affect anything and I can't even see them, but only spot that *something* is
there when trying to select the image. Odd - not a problem (as far as I
know) but as this is a report on what happens here, I thought I'd mention
it.

3a (svg with walls and lables only, no passage fill colour)

I can change the line weight
okay, but as I hit as a problem before when working on files like this, 
the paths don't seem to stay as a path (text, for example, aren't words 
but just single letters) and I can't figure out how to do a fill to add 
colour to the passage content. That is, if there is a colour there, I'm 
pretty sure I can change it but I can't select enough to actually add a 
fill in the first
place.

3b (svg with only cross section switched off)
The detailed view won't open correctly in Illustrator - there are warnings
about too many nested groups (surprising considering the complexity of the
.svg files for the Three Counties that are in the next issue, which breezed
through) and that it might not look correct, then it opens with most of the
content missing (the only bit that appears fully intact is at the extreme
bottom and only for a few metres). Needed for this I think/suspect: some
work in flattening/decreasing grouping in the original before creating the
.svg, but I don't have experience of the creating package (nor any other
vector software).

3c (pdf with cross sections off)
Having imported the pdf to Illustrator, as I mentioned already evident 
is that the file has been simplified by having taken that route, rather 
than the svg. At least, that's my assumption as it opened without 
warning about groups, as opposed to opening without any real content 
remaining.