Does anyone still draw up maps entirely by hand?

[STLCaver]

Students can get Xara X for $99. That's way cheaper than Illustrator, and it works just fine. T

[steelwool]

Pencils are more expensive than therion or survex... There open source! weee.

[Teresa]

You *buy* pencils????

With all the free giveaway pencils in the world??

Who cares what the paint says.

[pulaskicaver]

With the help of my more computer savy friend Jeff Crews (MSM Spelunkers Club) we do a combination of computer and manual drafting. Jeff uses compass program to make line plots on gridded 8.5 X 11 vellum. I draw the maps by hand in pecil on these sheets from the field notes. Jeff scans them loads them into his laptop and digitally drafts them in XARA. The final maps look hand drawn. It all seems relative to how much time you want to spend at the computer...you can whip out a quickie or take your time to produce great looking maps. I prefer to do it this way because as sketcher it gives me final editing decisions on the map rather than giving someone the raw notes. And yes, I use carbide. Is there any other way? (grin)

[Joel Sneed]

I still draw maps by hand but have of late begun to eschew Leroi lettering.
And I still triangulate locations - anyone know what that is?. I also use carbide; after four decades, why change now. But I no longer use Goldline to prussik on!

[Spike]

I don't use Compass to generate a line plot. I use Walls. It's freeware and more powerful. Also if you want your digital cave map to look hand drawn rather than computer generated use round caps on all your lines.

Spike