Bedding planes, rose diagrams and bug fix

[Wookey]

On Tue 02 May, Phil Underwood wrote:
> On Tue, 02 May 2000, you wrote:
> >
> >1) display indicator of entrances. (hmm, that's not really analysis is
> >it, but it would be _really_ useful)
> >
> But we need then to have a command like *entrance <station> to define an
> entrance, and this needs to be transferred to the 3dx file somehow.

Indeed. This would be an attribute of the entrance station. sytanx might
perhaps be 
*attribute entrance <station>
I've posted a couple of times to this list about my ideas for attributes,
in an attempt to get a consenesus to make it worth implemntning
something, but got bugger all response. I suppose that means no-one
violently objected. But I was kind of hoping someone else would actually
get enthused an implement it :-)

'entrance' and 'surface' are two if the most fundamental attributes. I
suspect my irritation will finally overcome my inertial/list of other
things to do and I might actually do something about this....

> If you *fix all the entrances, I'd be able to make chasm display marks next
> to fixed stations.
> Any ideas what symbol you'd want to use here - what about #p161 instead of
> \p161, next to a cross marking the location?

I had a 'gunsight circle' in mind, but a 'cave symbol' or cross would
work. 'survey station triangles' would be appopriate for Fixed points. 

A flexible mechanism for connecting symbols/colours to attributes is
definately in order, with some sensible defaults.
 
> >2) easy-to-use 'distance between points' system. 
> Tickmarks on the scalebar will go in the next release - very easy.
> The distance between two points bit should also be pretty easy - I'll put
> that in my TODO list.

The hardest bit is getting the user interface right. Should it be a mode
or use a different button click. Do we have a concept of a 'current
station' and a right click on another gives the distance, or perhaps a
right-drag between two points would measure it (except that's the 2D
answer, which may not be what was required....)

> >Maybe aven already has these? Oh how I wish I could compile all these new
> >versions :-(... [last attempt told me that gtk was missing a load of Xlib
> >headers which presumably means I need X-devel package(s). It's such a long
> >CD/download chain to get anywhere if you don't start from the right
> >place....]
> Would an rpm help? - I'm willing to fettle one up so that all you need is
> the rpm, and the relevant gtk libs. i386 only, I'm afraid.

I suppose it might, yes. But it's probably more useful if you spend your
time writing code...


> >Option to display depth-only useful too for doing elevations. 
> I could put this in the status bar at the bottom fairly easily.

I envisioned this as instead of/as well as station labels to you can see
which parts of survey are how deep. Just showing depth for current stn
isn't quite as useful.

> A list of stations to produce a file with positions would be possible with
> a little work.  Constant offset is possible, but comparative adjustments
> will be very hard - you might as well put the data in later.

The idea was that I only have to do this once for a given survey (ie it
gets saved). So I select some representative depth points. Select a
reference for them (normally the highest entrance or sea-level), and then
have a 'tweak' button to include +/- a few metres adjustment for a few of
them. But yes, the facility without the last bit would still be useful.

At the moment I have to loko at the survey and write down some suitbale
points, then manually go through the POS file fishing out the numbers and
rounding them and typing them into a TeX file. Next time we find another
entrance I have to do them all again. 

> I'd prefer to output plain ASCII (maybe tab-delimited)- much more portable,
> and you can cut and paste more happily into other apps. And of course,
> ASCII is easy, and I don't understand TeX too well.

fair enough. munging it into something prettier for printing shouldn't be
difficult.

Wookey
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