Export formats

[Olly Betts]

On Sat, Jun 04, 2016 at 09:48:38PM -0700, David A. Riggs wrote:
> The .PLT file format is actually the compiled output from Compass. See
> documentation at:

Indeed, but Survex's PLT export was done explicitly for use with Carto,
rather than aiming to provide a generally useful PLT file.

> This lineplot format can thus be used by many of the tools within the
> Compass suite

Is what Survex produces useful in this way though?  I've never tried
this output with Compass (no Linux version!)

There's little attempt to match Compass requirements or conventions.
For example, everything is just exported as a single survey, rather than
trying to map Survex's survey structure, and station names can be
arbitrarily long (Compass at least used to have a limit of 12
characters, and the PLT format docs still seems to suggest that's the
case).  About all we do is to escape characters in station names which
the PLT format doesn't allow (spaces and control characters).

(Not to be confused with the PLT file *reading* in Survex, which should
work well with files from Compass, and from elsewhere if they conform to
the PLT format documentation).

Cheers,
    Olly