Anyone use the new Compass line plot exporter?

[reeffish1073]

Just Curious
Anyone use the new Compass line plot exporter? What is your thought about it, and are you pleased with how it exports the line plot to the artboard?

[Dwight Livingston]

Just Curious
Anyone use the new Compass line plot exporter? What is your thought about it, and are you pleased with how it exports the line plot to the artboard?

I have used it and I like it very much. Once in Illustrator there are various layers I need to strip out - all I want are the survey lines, station labels, and LRUDs. I like in particular the ability to do profile view plots with full control over what stations are plotted are what are not. Before this I was using bitmaps to input an image of the plot, and this works much better. There are a few things to get used to, but with a little banging on the controls I found everythign I needed.

The only improvement I would want is to separate the UP and DOWN lines from the LEFT and RIGHT lines, so I don't have to have both.

Dwight

[reeffish1073]

Dwight

So you strip off all the stuff you dont need after you inport it to illistrator? This sounds time consumeing on large project caves!

[Dwight Livingston]

John

It's by layer, and you don't really need to delete it, you can just hide the layers. That doesn't take very long, so really I am just being picky. Also, I have not been through the process of updating a plot in an Illustrator file (I don't mean round tripping, just updating the map with the latest plot.) I need to check how well it maintains relations with the source files, if the scale stays the same (this is a problem when placing images,) and if the deleted or hidden layers stay deleted or hidden. I will try this weekend.

Dwight

[Stan Allison]

I like the ability to export SVG lineplots of profiles with the new Compass exporter. I have been using Walls to export and roundtrip SVG files with Illustrator for several years, but it isn't possible to export profiles in Walls. I haven't actually round-tripped anything with the Compass SVG exporter yet, but hope to do so in the future.

Stan

[Crockett]

It's not just for the "artboard".

I have exported line plots from Compass as shapefiles and used them in Quantum GIS. Among other things more layers can be included for streams, trails, roads, and elevations. Helps you figure out where the cave is. QGIS is free and not too complicated.

I have also exported 2D and 3D DXF files for use in Autocad. It is not free and not uncomplicated but it probably counts as the "artboard".

I would post example image files here but that seems to be beyond my abilities which proves I am just a hack.

[driggs]

Anyone use the new Compass line plot exporter? What is your thought about it, and are you pleased with how it exports the line plot to the artboard?

Not only does it work and work well, but the Compass SVG Exporter was the only option for exporting a lineplot in a format suitable for Adobe Illustrator CS4 that I could get to work at all.

The DXF export is either broken, the free Illustrator plugins for DXF have fallen into disuse, or the DXF standard is so vague that it's an unusable standard. Similarly, the Cave Illustrator plugin doesn't work on any remotely-recent version of Adobe Illustrator and the author appears to have no plans to update it.