Spud stuff: other survey software; and a few other bits.

[Wookey]

On Tue 10 Oct, Philip Underwood wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, you wrote:

> > I think integration with ArcView just needs shapefile output. 

that's correct. We have an inside contact in the form of Bernie Szukalski who
works at Arcinfo. He is happy to test stuff but doesn't know anything about
programming.

> > The shapefile format is a bit strange, but there's a free (user's choice
> > of LGPL or old MIT style) library to read and write them:

It's very odd in fact. It has both little endian and big-endian items in it's
data structures and we were astrongly recommended to use the libraries. Doing
it directly looks like a horrid job. We only actually need to use a small
subset of it's capabilities anyway.


> > The real benefit of using docbook is you can generate a nice printed
> > version. I believe you can also generate ms windows help files.
> Is it possible to set up the sgml so that specific bits are output to 
> specific files and sub-dirs; this makes context sensitive help a lot
> easier.

You can split it into files for the HTML stuff (so long as 'specific bits'
corresponds to 'sections' in the docs). So yes it is possible. It might need
something a bit fancy to move files into appropriate subdirs or produce split
output in something other than HTML, but I think we could do a reasonable job
of it without too much effort if necessary. 
 
> Also, Mark Shinwell wrote:
> > Yeah, but one says just "HTML" but how do we display it?  Netscape?
> > Konqueror?  Internet Explorer?  Mozilla?  
> I'd let the user decide. Virtually everyone with the set-up that would be 
> needed to run spud will have a browser of some description. 

Agreed. Strongly.

> > Nasty problem... I think a
> > Mozilla plug-in to GTK might be the best option...
> If we do code a browser in, can we have a really simple, stable one. Help 
> files shouldn't really need very fancy abilities - tables, images, and 
> various sized text should be all that's needed. Maybe there's a simple GTK 
> plug-in available. I think Mozilla might be a bit too big for this.

Coding-in a specific browser, especially a fat one, is a very stupid idea. We
are only talking about Help text here. We could do a pretty good job in HTML
2.0 and a very thorough one in 3.2 (ie tables is the most advanced thing we
might need). We need about 10 different tags. There is no issue of browser
compatibility at all here.

Wookey
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