drawing up - seeking advice

[Wookey]

+++ Andy Waddington on Cave Surveying [04-03-30 16:24 +0100]:
> On Tuesday 2004-03-30 15:22, Eric Madelaine typed:
> > wookey@aleph1.co.uk said:
> 
> David MacKenzie was demonstrating software that did this in 1981
> when I visited Mexico and Texas, and wrote it up in the AMCS Activities
> Newsletter along with quite a bit of the maths that drove it. He was using
> it to plot maze caves where new closures morphed the cave almost every
> trip or so... I find it amazing that there aren't lots of packages to do this
> sort of thing by now - 23 years is a LONG time in the software world :-(

yes - that was called ellipse, and was indeed a long way ahead of it's time.
The problem is that you actually need a lot of fancy input UI as well as the
sums. The sums is actually a fairly small part of writing a useful solution
for the average surveyor. And didn't ellipse run on a university mainframe
at that time, which also limited it's adoption?

I think he's gone on to incorporate this stuff into Walls - the latest
version includes 'SVG round-tripping' which I believe is the functionality
under discussion. (but I can't tell, 'cos it's only for Windows :-)

Survex should probably gain an SVG export sometime soon - someone stick it
on the todo list. Probably better than postscript for the reasons John
described.

Wookey
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