[Therion] reposting from Survex

Martin Sluka martinsluka at mac.com
Sat Oct 13 09:45:48 CEST 2012


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tell the user this version is outdated?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





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