Compass

[barcelonacvr]

I just purchased Larry Fish's Compass program as I am going to integrate Auriga into my surveying.

I was using On Station before.

I will of course read all the manuals/tutorials but I wonder how big of a learning curve there is to the program.

Any insight/tips anyone can share?

Another question :

I have been using XARA X to draw my maps but I have Adobe Illustrator.

Which program would be the best to use in the end run?

I only use InDesign so I would have to learn Illustrator ( I have the tutorial discs)

If Illustrator is only slightly better,would it be worth discarding my familiarity with XARA X to convert?

[Spike]

I can't speak regarding the use of Compass, I use Walls. I do use Xara X to draft my maps and I am very happy with them. I haven't found Illustrator maps to be superior, but I have heard that the Illustator learning curve is very steep and the memorization of short cuts is key in being proficient. At Mammoth, many of the cartographers in the CRF are using Illustrator, so when I start on my sheet I will use Illustrator so that will have compatibility with the other cartographers. If your making maps that are going to be wrapped up and little likelyhood of being edited later by Illustrator users then I would stick with Xara and produce more maps rather than relearning how to digitaly draft maps with no substantial return.

Spike

[barcelonacvr]

Thanks Spike..I would say indeed the Illustrator learning curve is huge ( I poked around the tutorial discs)

Unless I am unable to cross use XARAX and Compass,I most definitely will stick to what I know.I have to poke around the software a lot to see what paths work.

[Bob Thrun]

If you are considering using Illustrator, you might look at the combination of WALLS and Illustrator. When you do a closure adjustment and the survey stations move, all the passage walls and detail will move with the stations.

Furthermore, WALLS has the best handling of blunder detection and error statistics.

Bob Thrun

[Erik]

I use Xara Xtreme and am very happy with it. It was easy to learn and a reasonable price. Apart from round-tripping it does everything that I could possibly want in a cave drawing program. The question really is do you want one-off cave maps or do you want maps which constantly need redrawing or adjusting due to additional survey data or loop closures or error correction or whatever. If the latter then bite-the-bullet and go the WALLS-Illy route. If the former then go the Xara route. Important for me with Xara is that it produces PDFs and TIFs for subsequent publication. It is also extremely fast.

I have used Illy 10 and CS and find them very difficult. However, that may simply be lack of practice. Also, I do not have the need for round-tripping so that is not a driving force.

If you want to cover your bases cheaply try Inkscape. It is open source, multi-platform and is at version 0.45. It uses SVG natively and at some stage may be able to round-trip with WALLS. But the demand for this is probably low at this stage, so getting it coded will be hard. It is free though and powerful.

CorelDraw is also worth considering. I find it more intuitive than Illy but I've not had much joy with its SVG capabilities.

The business of file interchange becomes really important when you have invested a lot of time in a digital map, so the commercial progs seem to have the edge here. SVG seems particularly hard here as many programs do not fully support the SVG format specifications. Inkscape does do a pretty good job here, as does Illy of course.

Erik