Cave drawing programs for Apple

[hardcorecaver]

What are the good cave drawing programs that work on apple OS X?

[cavemanjonny]

If you plan on drawing everything out by hand, Adobe Illustrator or ACD CanvasX are both very good. They are both pretty pricey, as well.

I am personally a fan of <a href="http://therion.speleo.sk/">Therion</a> but I wouldn't call it cave drawing software, exactly. It generates maps from your survey data (and other things). It is free, but has a steep learning curve.

[Aaron Addison]

I know that some folks have started looking at a SVG based drafting program called Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/). Using SVG as a native file format would have obvious advantages if you were working with a survey program such as WALLS. SVG as a file format is not without its problems though.

One nice thing about Inkscape is that it will run on Windows and OSX (and other platforms).

[Martin Sluka]

What are the good cave drawing programs that work on apple OS X?

What should be your final product? The final map of cave in which is no any chance to find more or always up to date documentation of surveying project?

[Dwight Livingston]

I know that some folks have started looking at a SVG based drafting program called Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/). Using SVG as a native file format would have obvious advantages if you were working with a survey program such as WALLS. SVG as a file format is not without its problems though.

One nice thing about Inkscape is that it will run on Windows and OSX (and other platforms).

Thanks much for your mention of Inkscape. I've wanted to use Walls with an illustration program for a long time but couldn't see spending the money on Illustrator. I downloaded Inkscape and plan on spending some of my holidays seeing if I can make it work. I'll let you know how it goes. Any hints or warnings about the process are welcome.

Dwight

[Tom Gilleland]

I reduce my data and make a line plot in the old Mac OS9 Cave Plot, or in Walls on a PC. (I have old machines still set up in my office.) I've heard of people installing Windows & OSX on the new Intel Macs, so you could explore that. I draw all my maps in Adobe Freehand, which is similar to Illustrator in functionality and price. Check ebay for a older versions and save tons of money. A great thing about Freehand is that it is easy to export out to a .pdf file for the final map. Here's a few of my latest maps in Freehand. Left click on the map to view it in your browser, right click to download linked .pdf file.

http://discovercaves.com/maps.htm

[Erik]

I have been following the Inkscape forum for several years and the program is becoming stronger and stronger. As I speak it is bringing out version 0.45. It uses SVG and can certainly create (vector) cave maps and is very useable, depending on the level at which you want to use it.
Big and complex files? -yes. It opens the sample map (KAUA-NM w2d mrg.svg) from WALLS and can handle that fairly compex map. I would not advise on starting to learn the program with that file though since it was not prepared in Inkscape.
If you want to do roundtripping you are out of luck with this program at present. So you cannot roundtrip with WALLS using it.
Standalone maps are quite feasible though and you can certainly do your data reduction in WALLS and then do the final draw in Inkscape.
While I am pretty familiar with Inkscape I do not use it for my day to day cave mapping. I use Xara Xtreme for that and find it much more friendly and easier to use. The main reason is that the import/export facilities are much more developed at this time.
PDFs from Xara are easy whereas they are not from Inkscape.
TIFS from Xara are easy whereas Inkscape uses PNGs.
Xara is used by quite a few cavers and there is a fair bit around the net on it. However, it is a Win program so maybe this thread is inappropriate.

Since Inkscape is open source and under active development it is well worth keeping an eye on. I do not see roundtripping on the roadmap but the facilities very much depend on who is interested in working on what. If a caver/mapper was interested in coding that ability into Inkscape then it could be in very soon but that is a rarish combination and I'm not holding my breath.
Otherwise it will do maps equal to the big ones that are around. remember though that the time invested in doing a big vector map is such that it is a bummer if you then want to use different programs. SVGs ain't all SVGs or something. Making and handling SVGs in CorelDraw for instance can give you major hassles if you try and use the SVG file in another SVG program-and vice versa.
The following site http://sss.boldlygoingnowhere.org/html/Maps.htm shows a couple of maps of simple sandstone caves produced by with Xara. The maps are jpegs, originals are vector.

Erik

[Martin Sluka]

What are the good cave drawing programs that work on apple OS X?

Anyway if you are working on still going project and you look forward new and new discoveries check the Therion - therion.speleo.sk

Martin

[RT]

I have tried to compile Therion on a G4 mac mini ..
not very successful..
Is it possible for anyone to distribute a compiled version ?

[steelwool]

You should try posting your problems to the therion mailing list.