drawing up - seeking advice

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 02:03:11PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> Do those who have been using these packages find that it is actually quicker
> than drawing with a pen? My experience is that labelling is _much_ quicker
> (and better), but the drawing is _much_ slower. Has that changed?

One option is to draw with pen, scan, and then label on the computer.

> > 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. 
> 
> that's not a hack - that's a perfectly sensible thing to do - print
> postscript to a file and import.

Indeed - postscript is really an open specification vector drawing language
rather than a language for talking to printers.  Some operating systems
even use DisplayPostScript as the main way of drawing on screen (Mac OS X
uses DisplayPDF which is closely related).

Another option is to export as DXF which many drawing packages can
import.

> Not really, but someone really needs to add 'print current view' to aven,
> and take the opportunity to use the OS printing system. Phil underwood got
> vageuly inspired about this a couple of weekends ago. That would definately
> improve people's lives.

Matt Ryan is also interested in doing this, though I think he's been a
bit busy to have made much headway.

The best approach is probably to use the wxWindows printing framework
(which uses the OS printing system).  Talking to the OS directly means
you need to implement it for every platform yourself.

I've wondered about doing a "quick and dirty" version of this, which
just calls printwin/printps/... with appropriate values to print the
current view.  The only slightly tricky part is how to handle the scale
- ideally you want to show allow the usual "Scale to fit on 1 page =
1:1800" "Please enter Map Scale = X:Y (default 1:500)" interaction, and
that needs to happen in the printer driver (otherwise you can't easily
show the scale to fit on 1 page).  But if we're happy for the printer
driver to run in its own window, that can be arranged.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
    Olly