Survex 0.99 prerelease 5

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

>> I use .pos files .. to know the locations of just a few stations

> Aven provides two easy ways to do so

I haven't yet got a version of aven to work at all, on any platform !
Dependencies ...

> You can point at a station on the survey

If I'm editing a dozen windows of cave descriptions, I really don't want to
bother with a graphical tool which will need a decent amount of desktop real
estate. Just another text file in a tiny tiny !Edit or !Zap window from
which I can do a <highlight>, <shift-f7> (YMMV)

> just get your program

why not just me ? why a program ?

> to run 3dtopos on the input .3d file

but typically, in the past, I had already thrown away the .3d file...
because I didn't need it for the job I was doing. OTOH, this is the first
time I have ever heard of 3dtopos.

There will always be a significant number of users who don't use a system
often enough to keep changing the way they use it, or even to keep up to
date with knowing about new facilities. 

> Never, never, never do this.

Never, never, never expect to be able to dictate how users will use your
software :-)

> The best approach is to make a leg in the joke survey a "nosurvey" leg

Didn't know about that (see above) - could be useful. But it would surely be
better to label the entire survey as having an effectively infinite standard
error, so that it would always be distorted to fit surrounding data, but
still provide the visual connectivity required. After all, it is just a
bodge to aid visualisation. Having a "nosurvey" leg would simply add a
stretchable link, which is *not* what is wanted in such a bodge.

Certainly one of these approaches is a good idea. Which reminds me, has
anyone checked to see if the 41 fiction survey is still there ? I suspect it
actually *isn't* connected at the bottom, so it *can't* distort the survey,
but it would be as well to check - it would be awful to find it was causing
people to look in wholly the wrong place for a connection :-(

Andy