Help with Compass dat files read (and processed) by Survex

[Olly Betts]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 08:22:14PM +0100, Olly Betts via Survex wrote:
> (My guess is that originally Compass only supported feet, and when
> metric support was added Larry chose to leave the distances in metric
> so that existing readers of the file could continue to work with new
> files.)

Sorry, that should be "chose to leave the distances in **feet**".

I've just confirmed the lengths in the file are in decimal feet by using
the CaveEd2.exe program from Compass to load a .dat file which includes:

| DECLINATION:    0.00  FORMAT: DMMDLRUDLADN
|
|     FROM       TO   LENGTH  BEARING      INC     LEFT       UP     DOWN    RIGHT   FLAGS  COMMENTS
|
|       #1       #2    23.52   197.00    -5.00     6.56     6.56     1.64     1.64

Double-clicking on the survey and selecting the "Edit Survey" tab I see:

  #1 #2 7.2m 197.0 -5.0 2.0m 0.5m 2.0m 0.5m

(23.52 feet is 23.53*0.3048 = 7.168896m so the tape measurement entered
originally was probably 7.17m.)

Cheers,
    Olly