Is it possible to use the sketch from pocket topo as a background to draw over the top? In a similar fashion to Therion.

managed to sort it now after a lot o pissing about

How??? (for the benefit of us all)

This is the way i did it, which more than likely was the long way round.

Exported the Outline from Pocket Topo.
Opened it in AutoCAD Exported it as a large size pdf.
Using acrobat pro saved the pdf as a jpg
imported it in the normal way.

Jams said:

This is the way i did it, which more than likely was the long way round.

Exported the Outline from Pocket Topo.
Opened it in AutoCAD Exported it as a large size pdf.
Using acrobat pro saved the pdf as a jpg
imported it in the normal way.

Click to expand...

You can open dxf files in Illustrator and export as a jpg. It would save one step.

Is it true you cant draw elevations in Tunnel ?  :-\

SamT said:

Is it true you cant draw elevations in Tunnel ?  :-\

Click to expand...

Alarmingly back on topic, yes it is true that elevation support had not yet been implemented in Tunnel. And yes it is a huge omission from a cave survey drawing up application. But then this is open source software, and the developers kindly make it available to the world before it is completely finished so that we can make use of what it can do. Which is produce updatable plan views of caves, something I think it does very well indeed.

Now while it is not supported, I have actually had some success producing a projected elevation by switching the vertical and horizonal coordinates columns around in a POS file generated from survex, and then imported a centreline from that into Tunnel. This gives a projected elevation (either N-S, or E-W depending on what columns you swap around) which I was then able to draw an elevation around. The nice thing about a projected E-W elevation is that you can place it across the top of your plan survey and all the features line up between the elevation and the plan as you scan down the page from the elevation to the plan.

Thanks footleg - very helpful.

Thought there must be a way, along the lines you mention. 

Fair comment about tunnel being open source too. Seems to me though, that it doesn't sound like too much work to get tunnel to do the column swapping at the push of a button and enable elevations to be drawn up. I'm sure the writers (Julian?) have it in mind.

There is a lot of active development going on in Tunnel, but other things have taken priority over elevations. The latest builds from the code allow finished maps to be output as SVG files for example. These can be opened by the open source vector drawing application inkscape, annotated and edited as desired and then saved as PDF files. These look really good and provide genuine scalable output rather than just dumping bitmaps into PDF files. So you can zoom in, search for and copy text etc.