Export formats

[David A. Riggs]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 5:04 PM, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:

> Currently aven supports exporting to the following formats:
>
> * PLT - intended for use with Carto (also via cad3d)
>
> I suspect some of these are no longer used.  For example, Skencil is an
> open source drawing package which last saw any development in 2010 from
> what I can see: http://skencil.org/, though perhaps other tools use the
> format.  Carto seems inactive too (last release 2005).
>


The .PLT file format is actually the compiled output from Compass. See
documentation at:


http://www.fountainware.com/compass/Documents/FileFormats/PlotFileFormat.htm

This lineplot format can thus be used by many of the tools within the
Compass suite, including, for example, the "cartography tools" which allow
one to morph scanned sketches, as well as Compass's own advanced plot
viewer.

Carto doesn't have an active public website any more (the old Potomac
Speleological Club site is an internet relic at this point), but was still
receiving updates in its subversion repository as recently as June 2015.
The author is probably the only actual user of that software at this point
(he's managing the working map of a 23+ mile cave system with it) and it
looks like he hasn't put effort into giving it a public home. It's fair to
call it "inactive", but the .PLT format is quite useful for taking
advantage of the Compass suite of tools.

- DR

-- 
David A. Riggs <david.a.riggs at gmail.com>