At the time Brandon produced these video tutorials, there was a bizarre software gap involved with getting a lineplot from Compass into Illustrator. The old
Cave Illustrator plugin, which would import Compass files directly into Illustrator, didn't support modern CS versions of Illustrator; Compass could export to AutoCAD DXF format, which CS4 claimed to be able to import, but it didn't work well enough to actually use.
So
Brandon's tutorial #6 suggests the desperate method of either physically printing the lineplot from Compass to paper, and then scanning it back into the computer as raster, or taking a low-resolution screenshot from Compass and then attempting to scale the bitmap appropriately in Illustrator. He then manually traces the lineplot as vector, by hand, and individually labels each station.
Please don't do this!
The
Compass SVG Exporter, a part of the "new" set of cartography tools, allows you to export a fantastic, properly-scaled vector version of the lineplot, station labels, LRUDS, passage geometry, etc. in a format that Illustrator (and Inkscape!) can import and use seamlessly. Larry Fish has an excellent tutorial on using the SVG exporter at the Compass website:
http://www.fountainware.com/compass/Cartography/SVGExport/SVGExport.htmThe resultant SVG file is organized well into layers, but they're in the ugly
Walls round-tripping format. The first thing I do is reorganize and rename the layers since I generally don't attempt round-tripping.
There's also a
Compass cartography tool for morphing sketches as an alternative to Brandon's method of re-penciling his sketches using a lightbox and the lineplot printout, but not everyone is sold on the utility of morphing sketches (I am!).
Going back through these video tutorials, I'm amazed at how many little Illustrator tips I'd forgotten or never absorbed previously!