cave mapping software for *nix

[sinukas]

Hey cavers...

Does anyone know of cave mapping software that will run on Linux/Unix? Most of the stuff out there seems to be written for Windows only... does something exist that is cross-platform compatible?

I'd rather not have to go back to windows just to handle my survey data

Thanks,

Will

[jharman2]

Therion

http://therion.speleo.sk/

Survex

http://survex.com/

If you are a computer nerd you can learn to use both in no time.

[sinukas]

thanks!!

[driggs]

John Harman has listed the two most popular and mature *nix cave software applications. I'll also throw in a recommendation for Tunnel, which is Java-based and runs on most platforms.

If you don't have a requirement for Free software, I will note that two of the most popular cave mapping applications for Windows, Walls and Compass, work reasonably well under Wine on Linux.

Note that Debian and Ubuntu users can quickly install Survex and Therion with one command:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install therion survex survex-aven survex-svxedit

[sinukas]

haha thanks for the apt-get... i'm running hardy heron

[KsCaver22]

Dang it, I tried a long post about Therion but the system timed out my login and it's all lost.

Long story short - Don't bother, get Windows in a VMWare session and use Walls. Therion is buggy, hard to use and very poorly supported.

Bill Gee

[jharman2]

I would also like to mention Carto that was written by PSC caver Ralph Hartley. It is java based so I assume it will run on *nix. I have never personally used it but have seen at least one very nice map produced using it. Like Therion, Carto warps the sketch to fit the lineplot. It is NOT a WYSIWYG editor like Tunnel. Carto is avaliable at: http://www.psc-cavers.org/carto/

[driggs]

Long story short - Don't bother, get Windows in a VMWare session and use Walls. Therion is buggy, hard to use and very poorly supported.

I will be the first to admit that Therion has a steep learning curve, especially for those without a technical background, but it is extremely powerful and it has a different intended use than Walls; Therion is for managing data and drawing a map, Walls is for managing data and letting you use something else to draw a map.

Don't write Therion off because of the learning curve. Walk through the step-by-step examples in Therion By Example, and keep the Therion Book handy for reference. Do a small cave (one or two scraps) first before trying something large.

To call Therion "very poorly supported" is not only unfair, but absolutely incorrect. There is an active mailing list and IRC channel where you can get immediate help from the authors and users. In addition, as Open Source Software, you may dig into the source code to find answers yourself (though the Therion source is terrifying!). I don't believe that any of these resources exist for Walls.

[cavemanjonny]

Dang it, I tried a long post about Therion but the system timed out my login and it's all lost.

Long story short - Don't bother, get Windows in a VMWare session and use Walls. Therion is buggy, hard to use and very poorly supported.

Bill Gee

I will second that Therion is certainly NOT poorly supported. The documentation can be a little hard to read at times, but asking the authors directly almost always gets you straightened out in at most a day or two.

As far as it being buggy goes, well, I don't know. I've never had any trouble running it in Linux or Windows. There are updates posted at least monthly, and if you have a specific bug, again, email the authors. They'll post a fix VERY quickly.

But yes, it is harder to learn than the other software packages, but it's well worth it, imho.

[KsCaver22]

It appears I had better expand on my earlier condemnation of Therion. The last time I tried a long post using this forum's editor, I hit the "Preview" button and was told my login had expired. I relogged in and got an empty window. Hitting the Back button did not get me back to what I had typed. In frustration I made the long story short. This time I will type my response in an external editor...

The original reply stated "if you are a computer nerd..." For what it's worth, I *am* a computer nerd. I earn a very decent income as a Windows expert for a major insurance company and have been doing it for almost 20 years. The first systems I ever supported ran Xenix. I have supported every version of MS-DOS since 2.0 and every version of Windows since it was beta. I've been running various RedHat Linux distros since version 5.

I have been using Therion for about two months on a Fedora 7 system. I use yum for updates and there is no Therion package in any yum repository I could find, so I compiled from source. That brought the first frustrations - Dependencies! It took me a couple of weeks to figure out that I needed to install several other packages before Therion would compile. For reference, they are:

wxGTK
wxGTK-devel
vtk
vtk-tcl
vtk-qt
vtk-python
vtk-devel
tkimg

All of these are available in yum repositories. As far as I can find, only wxGTK is documented as a requirement for Therion.

I have version 0.5.1 of Therion which is the most current production release from August 2007. There are more recent releases, but they are labeled "developer snapshots". I don't want to debug code - I want to run it! I avoid developer releases unless absolutely required.

A month ago I tried to join the Therion email list. It required filling out an application form which would be approved by a list admin. A month later I got an automatic email saying my application was rejected because no one had looked at it. Any forum where the admins do not check in for a month qualifies as "poor support".

The documentation on Therion's Web site is extensive but rather incomplete. I have read and read through The Therion Book. It is useful if you know exactly what to look for, but is not a tutorial. The tutorial examples are a good start but have not been finished and look like they have not been updated for several years.

Perhaps some of what I need could be done in Metapost, but that seems like an extreme measure to take. This should not be so hard... We use computers to make life easier!

Here are my current problems with Therion:

1) Bug! I have a bunch of passage-height points on the map. I added "-value=xx" for the height in feet. When Therion compiles the map, it thinks the values are meters and converts them to feet. The result is that the printed values on the map are about 3 times larger than they should be. All other values (also in feet) come out correct.

Related - I have not found a way to specify a single point which has a value for ceiling height above water and water depth. Therion requires putting in two points for this, and they have to be offset far enough that the compiled map will not overlay the labels on top of each other.

2) There is a stream flowing in the cave. I created an area on each scrap which outlines the stream, then labeled it as "water". When the map is compiled and the scraps joined, the water areas do not join cleanly.

3) Bug! Scraps do not always join as expected. I have one join where Therion insists on connecting the south wall of one scrap with the north wall of the next, then leaving the remaining walls unattached. Even when I specify the exact points to join (took two weeks to figure out how to do that!), it still joins the scraps wrong.

4) I get numerous errors about "scrap outline intersects itself". The map compiles but no background colors are drawn. Some of these errors come from cross sections where there is only a single outline object on the scrap!

5) My sketches are drawn in several orientations. I did not scan them with north=up. Most of the time this is not a problem. However, it means the orientation of some cross-sections is wrong. I have not found a way to tell Therion to rotate a cross-section scrap. So far the only way I know to deal with this is to rescan the sketch so the cross-section is oriented correctly, then create the scrap from that.

6) Bug! Therion uses Survex to reduce the survey line plot data. Survex is able to accept "no data" for some items, but not for clino shots. I found that you *MUST* give it both forward and backward clino numbers even if one of the numbers was not collected. It will happily accept having only one or the other compass shot, but insists on having two clino shots.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds..." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

7) When forward and backward shots are given, Therion takes a simple average of the two numbers for the plot. Most of the time this is OK, but sometimes you know one shot is better than the other. There is no way to indicate which shot to preferentially use.

8) The cave I am working on has a maze area. We did the sketch through there on two lines, one for the upper and another for the lower level. The line plots are connected at a couple of survey points. How are these scraps drawn and overlayed on each other? I found examples for when two passages cross, but nothing for this kind of situation.

9) Bug! I have seen Therion compile maps to PDF which cause kpdf to run for an hour at 100% CPU and cause Adobe Reader to throw a Windows exception fault.

With this background, my advice to anyone who is not both very determined and a computer nerd is to run Windows+Walls (or Xera or ???) in a VMWare session. Hmmm... Come to that, just getting VMWare client to run on Linux is a major exercise that involves recompiling the kernel! Let me change that advice: Get a cheapo computer off eBay to run Windows.

Bill Gee

[cavemanjonny]

As far as I can find, only wxGTK is documented as a requirement for Therion.

Yes, I see why this can be frustrating. All of the unspecified requirements are prerequisites for wxGTK to install, which is a pain, I agree.

I have version 0.5.1 of Therion which is the most current production release from August 2007. There are more recent releases, but they are labeled "developer snapshots". I don't want to debug code - I want to run it! I avoid developer releases unless absolutely required.

I alternate between staying with the stable version and installing the developers snapshot if it has a new feature I want to try out, or a bug fix. I won't lie, bugs do creep in (as I'm sure you know!), but my experience has been good as far as them being fixed. Especially if the software contradicts the manual.

A month ago I tried to join the Therion email list. It required filling out an application form which would be approved by a list admin. A month later I got an automatic email saying my application was rejected because no one had looked at it. Any forum where the admins do not check in for a month qualifies as "poor support".

Frankly, I'm shocked! The mailing list is very active, so I don't know why this happened? I didn't even know that an admin had to approve your application. I'll bring this to the admins attention. Even if you don't reattempt to join, they should know about it to prevent the same sort of thing from happening in the future.

The documentation on Therion's Web site is extensive but rather incomplete. I have read and read through The Therion Book. It is useful if you know exactly what to look for, but is not a tutorial. The tutorial examples are a good start but have not been finished and look like they have not been updated for several years.

Some of the tutorials are dated, I agree. The most current source of information is definitely the mailing list. The documentation is kept in wiki form, which is handy, but.... I guess all the real Therion wizards are busy making maps instead of updating the wiki :-/

Here are my current problems with Therion:

1) Bug! I have a bunch of passage-height points on the map. I added "-value=xx" for the height in feet. When Therion compiles the map, it thinks the values are meters and converts them to feet. The result is that the printed values on the map are about 3 times larger than they should be. All other values (also in feet) come out correct.

This bothers me a little bit. For passage dimenions, I usually use the "dimensions" point type and then add "-value [2.4 10 ft]" in the options box. This properly dimensions your 3D lox model. These don't show up in the map though. The "units" tag only affects your survey data, not the 3D model. That is something that should be changed, imho. It should affect ALL the data. You shouldn't have to specify units for every point.

Related - I have not found a way to specify a single point which has a value for ceiling height above water and water depth. Therion requires putting in two points for this, and they have to be offset far enough that the compiled map will not overlay the labels on top of each other.

Not sure about this, I've never run into this scenario.

2) There is a stream flowing in the cave. I created an area on each scrap which outlines the stream, then labeled it as "water". When the map is compiled and the scraps joined, the water areas do not join cleanly.

You mean the lines in the adjoining scraps don't line up? Agreed, that is annoying, and I don't know what the solution is.

3) Bug! Scraps do not always join as expected. I have one join where Therion insists on connecting the south wall of one scrap with the north wall of the next, then leaving the remaining walls unattached. Even when I specify the exact points to join (took two weeks to figure out how to do that!), it still joins the scraps wrong.

Are the walls oriented correctly? If you've accidentally reversed a wall, therion will try to join them so that they are facing the the same direction, which it does by using the wrong end of the line, from your perspective.

4) I get numerous errors about "scrap outline intersects itself". The map compiles but no background colors are drawn. Some of these errors come from cross sections where there is only a single outline object on the scrap!

This often creeps in from scrap distortions introduced by loop-closure adjustment or scrap joins. If you don't see anything wrong, it probably isn't a huge deal.

5) My sketches are drawn in several orientations. I did not scan them with north=up. Most of the time this is not a problem. However, it means the orientation of some cross-sections is wrong. I have not found a way to tell Therion to rotate a cross-section scrap. So far the only way I know to deal with this is to rescan the sketch so the cross-section is oriented correctly, then create the scrap from that.

I'm not sure, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure there is a solution, but I'm not aware of it, off the top of my head.

6) Bug! Therion uses Survex to reduce the survey line plot data. Survex is able to accept "no data" for some items, but not for clino shots. I found that you *MUST* give it both forward and backward clino numbers even if one of the numbers was not collected. It will happily accept having only one or the other compass shot, but insists on having two clino shots.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds..." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Agreed, this annoys me to no end. This is something that the developers (Stacho Mudrak and Martin Budaj) would most likely fix very quickly for you, however. That is assuming you could get on the mailing list :-/.

7) When forward and backward shots are given, Therion takes a simple average of the two numbers for the plot. Most of the time this is OK, but sometimes you know one shot is better than the other. There is no way to indicate which shot to preferentially use.

If you know one shot is bad, why are you keeping it? You could simply not include it in the digital version.

8) The cave I am working on has a maze area. We did the sketch through there on two lines, one for the upper and another for the lower level. The line plots are connected at a couple of survey points. How are these scraps drawn and overlayed on each other? I found examples for when two passages cross, but nothing for this kind of situation.

The lower passage will appear semi transparently where it is overlaid by the upper passage. Otherwise it will look like normal passage.

9) Bug! I have seen Therion compile maps to PDF which cause kpdf to run for an hour at 100% CPU and cause Adobe Reader to throw a Windows exception fault.

Uggg, that's awful! What circumstances brought this up?

With this background, my advice to anyone who is not both very determined and a computer nerd is to run Windows+Walls (or Xera or ???) in a VMWare session. Hmmm... Come to that, just getting VMWare client to run on Linux is a major exercise that involves recompiling the kernel! Let me change that advice: Get a cheapo computer off eBay to run Windows.

Bill Gee

I agree that Therion is very hard to learn and can be frustrating at times to use. Once you've got the hang of it you'll absolutely love it! I can't imagine using anything else. There is a lot of good software out there, though, Walls included. Use what works best for you. Thank goodness I didn't have the same troubles getting Therion to run, or I certainly wouldn't have stuck with it and come to appreciate it.

[cavemanjonny]

I've posted a link to this thread on the therion mailing list. Hopefully someone smarter than me can address your problems.

[driggs]

Moderators, please move this discussion about Therion issues into its own thread so as not to ruin the thread listing Unix cave mapping software.

[cavemanjonny]

Moderators, please move this discussion about Therion issues into its own thread so as not to ruin the thread listing Unix cave mapping software.

Yep, good idea. I got a bit off topic .