Having finally accepted that I didn't have the time or the patience to get to grips with using Therion to draw up a survey, I looked around for a standard vector drawing package. There was no way I was forking out hundreds of pounds for Adobe Illustrator, but Google turned up a free, open source equivalent; Inkscape http://inkscape.org/

I gave it a try and was quickly impressed. Intuitive and easy to use with only minimal manual reading required. I could import centrelines from Survex, sketch around them, add text and stuff dead easily. Then the result can be exported to PDF. I just thought I'd let people know about this free tool. My finished survey is here: http://www.ukcaving.com/wiki/index.php/File:Cabsav_survey_v1.pdf

Rhys

Nice!

inkscape is indeed a good program , ive used it for a couple of year for the design of logos and t-shirt designs 

Nothing wrong with PDF but the Inkscape file format is SVG so it is directly viewable in most web browsers. It also means that it would not be hard to convert bearing/distance/LRUP data directly to SVG and then open it in Inkscape to tidy up.

Rhys

Nice drawing, I've not used Inkscape but have heard good things about it. I shall exhort you to keep trying to master Therion, as the added flexibility it gives you is well worth the effort. For one thing, if this cave goes at any time, then you will have to redo this whole drawing.

I will make one criticism, however. This is something that was drummed into me 30 years ago, when I first submitted a survey for publication. If you look at your scale bars, the black boxes are about 5% longer than the white ones. This is a consequence of the method used to draw them; it is far preferable to use an open ruler, like the one drawn by Survex (ignore the bottom bit, use the lines on the top bit to actually measure things).

In fact the single case  I know of someone who got it right using boxes actually wrote the code for it for use in Therion!

And even then it was commented that ink bleed would ruin it when printing.

I use Inkscape for all of my figures/diagrams, it's perfectly fine.

Couple of things that aren't too good though - in some cases, the "export to PDF" option doesn't produce a perfect image, i.e. sometimes lines get thicker or thinner for no good reason....this might be the fault of the PDF extension that Inkscape uses rather than the program itself, but I haven't got around to investigating it yet.

Rhys: I noticed that the arrow heads on your orientation aren't great....if you're interested, there's an option under "Fill & Stroke" then "Stroke style" that allows you to add end and start markers, such as arrow heads to a line. Apologies if you've already discovered that.

P

We've used Inkscape for the last 5 years of Surveys from Slovenia. We draw in extended elevation, none of the more sophisticated packages seem to do this well.
Import of centreline works very well from survex if you export in SVG.

One particular benefit of inkscape is the (vector) import of PDF files, we used this to bust our previous survey out of Coreldraw format we used to use.

There are some issues with PDF export, particularly as they changed the underlying method a few years ago. 'Save a copy as' seems the best current way. It renders strangely in some readers, notable Google Chrome makes the lines thicker, but seems to print correctly, which is the main thing!

Coreldraw was probably more complete, and easier to use in some ways (in particular, proper nested layers was very useful for different years / plan / elevation / etc.), but Inkscape is freely available, so you can't complain, and gets notably better with every year.

If interested, you can see the published PDF, and the internal Inkscape SVG if you so wish of our latest survey this year here:

http://union.ic.ac.uk/rcc/caving/slovenia/slov2011/

Also, these UIS symbols were useful (took a bit of Googling, the links in my copy of the BCRA cave survey handbook were out of date).

I think I similarly imported the 'download' PDF into Inkscape, but then generally sketched identical symbols next to them with fewer nodes / more simple vector form.

http://www.carto.net/neumann/caving/cave-symbols/uis_signatures_english.pdf

http://www.carto.net/neumann/caving/cave-symbols/cave_symbol.php?languageSelection=english

Patrick Warren used Inkscape to produce an updated survey of a Matienzo cave - Cueva de la Morenuca - in 2009. The link shows the old cave in black (produced years ago on the brilliant Archimedes machine) and Patrick's additions in blue. Both were based on Survex as the centre line.
http://www.geography.lancs.ac.uk/Matienzo/surveys/0774.pdf

You may do the same in therion. Export to PDF (or SVG), open in Inkscape and tune it - colors, labels, etc. I'm sure in the same time. As addition you receive all features therion's outputs allow.

It's good to get some other views and it's nice to hear that others have used the program.

Testergerbil: Thanks for the comment on my arrows. I realise they're not great. It was my first attempt and I was getting to grips with it. I hadn't really twigged what the start and end markers were all about. I'll have a play with that.

Graham: I really wanted to get Therion to work as I do realise what the advantages are. I was getting nowhere fast and had set myself a deadline of Hidden Earth to finish a version of the drawing. As for the scale bars, they were basically traced from an Aven (Survex) screenshot. I'll have a look at that too. I will almost certainly do another version as there is a bit of unsurveyed stuff in the cave and extensions are quite likely. I reckon I'll be able to do that without redrawing the whole thing.

Is no-one out there using "tunnel" any more then.  I've used it for one survey, and was getting to grips with it, however I got distracted by other things and haven't used it again for a while.  Seemed like a sensible choice, given the ability to add amend in the future in the event of extensions/closed loop corrections etc. along with the library of cave features such as Sand/slope/pitch edge, undercuts, cross hatch for sumps etc etc.

I'm guessing therion does all this too, but haven't started using it. Sounds like you need to be quite dedicated to it for a good while to get your head round it.

Rhys said:

As for the scale bars, they were basically traced from an Aven (Survex) screenshot.

Click to expand...

Aye, it's the 'traced' thing. The centre of the line between boxes is the datum point, but the line doesn't (obviously)  have zero thickness, so the filled boxes are larger by the width of a line than they should be and the empty ones are smaller by the same amount. it's far better to use a 'ladder' style scale bar than a 'box' one. That way it is obvious where to measure from.

Somewhere I have a bit of code that Andrew wrote for Therion which does draw boxes with a zero thickness line, but even then it'll suffer from ink bleed when actually printed.

But won't the whole survey suffer from ink bleed by a similar amount?

TheBitterEnd said:

But won't the whole survey suffer from ink bleed by a similar amount?

Click to expand...

Of course, but I'm just talking about the bit used to measure stuff.

graham said:

Somewhere I have a bit of code that Andrew wrote for Therion which does draw boxes with a zero thickness line, but even then it'll suffer from ink bleed when actually printed.

Click to expand...

I think this would be quite easy to do with Inkscape, just draw a single rectangle with no 'stroke' (inkscape term for line) of correct length, replicate it and clip them together along the edges, flip the alternate colours to white and then draw lines along the edges. You can edit the properties of objects directly, so if you have a well defined scale for your drawn survey it is trivial to get the sizes right. I've also artificially added 10m/100m lines (i.e. a set of artificial axes) to the survex file to cross-check the scale bar.

Similarly I've found it's well worth setting the 'grid' in Survex to a useful dimension (it does a Major and Minor series, for differing zoom levels).

I also drew a mini right angled scale bar (like an L) with a concentric roundel for the outside three-quarters of the circle, which I find really useful to keep in a hidden layer and use it to check that passage dimensions in non-orthogonal directions are sensible.

Thinking about it, there's actually quite a few tips and tricks to drawing up in Inkscape, and if there is a community out there using it, it may be useful to put together a guide / page on the Wiki?

jarvist said:

I think this would be quite easy to do with Inkscape, just draw a single rectangle with no 'stroke' (inkscape term for line) of correct length, replicate it and clip them together along the edges, flip the alternate colours to white and then draw lines along the edges. You can edit the properties of objects directly, so if you have a well defined scale for your drawn survey it is trivial to get the sizes right.

...

Thinking about it, there's actually quite a few tips and tricks to drawing up in Inkscape, and if there is a community out there using it, it may be useful to put together a guide / page on the Wiki?

Click to expand...

Yeah, I suppose you should be able to do a zero thickness line to define a box. I'll have to try.

Re the wiki page. Go for it! I was going to add Inkscape here:
http://www.ukcaving.com/wiki/index.php/Surveying

I don't have time to do it at the moment though...

Rhys

I too make use of Inkscape. I am using Tunnel for my main project which is an on-going resurvey and update to a 55km system in Matienzo. But I export my survey from Tunnel as SVG, import it into Inkscape and generate a PDF from there. Here is an example: http://geography.lancs.ac.uk/Matienzo/surveys/0105-0107-2011.pdf

Graham will be pleased to see my scale box has the same widths for the solid and empty boxes that make up the ruler. As someone already mentioned, you just set the stroke width to zero (or use no stroke) so that the boxes are the same width as the spaces between them.

I am also using Inkscape to import my survey into Therion in order to generate better 3D models (and to learn Therion!). The process I use is to take my Tunnel SVG output into Inkscape, where the excellent 'select by searching for text defining the style' ability allows me to automatically select all the centrelines and wall lines to promote them onto new layers. I can then hide the rest of the details from the Tunnel survey. Once I have cleaned up the Inkscape file to just contain the data I need for my model (the walls and centrelines) I save this to SVG and do a search and replace edit in a text editor to append a label to each line to indicate whether it is a wall or a survey line. These labels are used by the Inkscape plugin for Therion. I then start converting the walls and centrelines into scraps for Therion (which needs the cave chopping up into smaller sections which are not allowed to overlap themselves. i.e. If two passages overlie one another then they need to be in separate scraps).  I can then export each scrap (from it's own layer) into Therion format using the Inkscape therion plug-in which allows you to save Therion sketch files (.th2) directly from Inkscape. These can then be opened in Therion and cleaned up (make all the lines have their 'inside/outside' marks the right way to indicate which side is cave and which is solid rock. Add the options to mark the wall lines which enclose loops/rock pillars and I can render a solid 3D model of the cave.

For those of you struggling to learn Therion, I too found it impossible to get started when I first tried. But after attending one of the excellent training weekends run by Andrew Atkinson I learned enough to get started and then it becomes much easier. I am in the process of writing a guide for cavers to cover all that was taught on these courses to serve as a course guide for future training and also as a tutorial for people who cannot make it to a course. I'll publish all these techniques once I have finished writing them.

Tunnel is generally easier to get started with and it an excellent program for drawing up plan surveys of large cave systems. The tutorials on the web (and new help pages included in the program) should make learning it much easier than in the past. I would recommend the easy install package 'Tunnel_Install.zip' (created by me so I would say that!) available from the project site here: https://bitbucket.org/goatchurch/tunnelx/downloads

Anyway you may try therion plugins to Inkscape: http://www.thomas-holder.de/projects/inkscape-speleo/extensions/th2-latest.zip . Not all features of xtherion map editor (areas) but most of them.