converting compass data to survex

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 10:08:42PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> Whats the current state of the art in compass->survex conversion?

Thanks to insomnia, the state of the art is that I now have a modified
version of cavern which will process Compass .dat files.  Scary eh?

I'd categorise it as "experimental" at best.  It processed a random
Compass dat file I found on the web, and the results look plausible.

Wooks: I'll send you a tarball, since you're after this for the weekend.
It needs a bit more testing, and some tidying up before being inflicted
on the general public.

On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 10:27:48AM +0100, Graham Mullan wrote:
> I have about 50 km of data which is spread almost equally between Compass
> and Survex and relates to caves within the same area. While it is useful to
> look at Compass plot files in Aven, I would like to be able to put them
> together.
> 
> However, would this be a simple job, considering the differences between how
> the two programs operate, that is how Survex keeps different surveys in
> different files and uses a hierarchical system of files to join them
> together whereas Compass puts different surveys in the same file, using
> unique station names?

Actually Compass does allow surveys to be stored in separate files, but
processed together.  At least the documentation says it allows it - I've
not tried.

But anyway, the thing to notice is that Survex allows all the data to be
in one file, with no hierarchy and universally unique names - it's just
a special case where the hierarchy is flat.

What probably would be hard is getting Compass to read Survex files -
in particular Compass lacks anything to map the survey hierarchy into
and you can't just flatten the hierarchy into explicit names (e.g.
161.entrance.7) as Compass doesn't allow station names of arbitrary
length.  IIRC, the official limit is 12, but from conversations with
Larry I gather much of the code will cope with longer names.

Cheers,
    Olly