Digital Sketching Alternative?

[rlboyce]

Ever hear of a "smartpen?" (http://www.livescribe.com/) I would never bring one into a cave, but when I saw this thing cave sketching came to mind. Disregarding practicality and the unsuitability for cave use, theoretically this would eliminate scanning a hand sketch and digitally tracing the sketch. Again, kind of neat but doesn't seem to belong in a cave.

Just found another one (http://www.adapx.com/products/capturx-onenote). This one is much more expensive, but claims to be "rugged" and can come with waterproof ink and paper. Maybe these things could stand up to a cave environment after all? For sketching aficionados, this might be interesting to try out.

[lleblanc]

Hi,

I'm currently readying on-screen sketching in Auriga, a cave survey freeware that runs on Palm OS PDAs. Such PDAs are still made by Aceeca - their 200$-PDA32 was released this week and they have a waterproof rugged model on its way - or can be found for cheap on eBay.

Sketching in Auriga is vector-based and self-adjusts to changes survey shots can later undergo (e.g. after loop closure). Auriga offers up to 10 sketch layers and a 256-color palette (if the device supports it). Sketching is done as with a pencil, tracing walls and details with curves, lines or points, eventually correcting them without needing to erase the replaced parts. As with a pencil, there is no symbol library, these must be hand-drawn. However Auriga offers to place floating text in the sketch. Everything gets exported in DXF and SVG. I hope to publish this within a month. In the meantime, a (short) glimpse of the freehand tool can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFPEJ8dUFxM