drawing up - seeking advice

[Robert Smallshire]

Hello,

>> Have you got any wise advice how to get the passage
>> walls + other details into a computer in a manageable
>> form?  Hopefully without too much expense on CAD
>> packages!  (Assume I can use unix, or MS windows)

> I have done some work in the past transferring a printed
> survey to vector drawing file using Xara.

I agree with Footleg in using Xara - in fact I believe I introduced him
to it many years ago. You can get Xara X at
http://www.xara.com/products/xarax/. I've used it to draw up many cave
surveys.

To get the Survex centreline in has usually involved some horrible hack
using postscript printer drivers from Survex spooling to file which I
then import into Xara. I haven't used Survex for a while (heck I haven't
been caving for a while!) so this workflow may have improved.

I've also done a lot of work with Xara for transcribing cave surveys and
geological maps from paper to digital form and I wouldn't hesitate to
recommend it for tracing huge bitmaps by hand. I have a collection of
ULSA surveys here scanned with an A0 drum scanner (as Wookey suggested)
and I can trace them no problem (you can't have too much RAM though!).

You can see an example of my Xara handiwork at:

http://www.smallshire.org.uk/images/dales/crucifiction.png

Good luck,

Rob