Compass on a Mac?

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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Crockett » Sep 17, 2011 7:06 pm

Installing Therion on a Mac is like caving without lights. You will not get very far before you get lost, confused, and hurt yourself.

In addition to Compass you will need a vector graphics drawing program. Use Inkscape. It is supported open source (free) and has versions that run on both Mac and Windows. The Compass tutorials for Inkscape are very good. The tutorials for Compass are in general very good.

I am a Mac fan but rather than run Compass on a Mac you can buy a cheap laptop, like a netbook, and load it up with memory (RAM) or go by a pawn shop and pick up a cheap desktop (spray it for bugs before you bring it into your vehicle or house). Extra memory is cheap and widely available. It comes in really handy when you are using the Compass feature to join sketch segments together.

Finally you will need a drawing tablet so you can draw with a pen rather than clicking and dragging with a mouse. I just looked on EBay and found an acceptable used one in seconds: a Wacom CTE-430 (Sapphire) for $25. The bigger the better.

Mike Rogers recently took up survey with Compass and Inkscape and quickly turned out a really nice map. Search the Tag-Net archives for more information.
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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Tlaloc » Sep 18, 2011 10:23 am

It would probably be fairly easy to create a version of one of these programs with a GUI using Xcode/Interface Builder, IF the rest of the code is in C.

The Therion page mentions compiling the code with the GCC compiler (which is part of XCode) so this must be the case with it. Walls started out as a UNIX program so I would guess that it's in C as well.

GUIs are great and a modern cave mapping program for the Mac would be worthwhile.
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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Martin Sluka » Sep 18, 2011 1:35 pm

Luc, there is nobody from both men they programmed therion, who is able to rewrite new interface. They are simple too busy. So if anybody is enough brave here, he/she may try it. Yes, it is written in C, anybody may download sources and check it. The part of program which generate maps use advantages of Metapost and TeX, but this is not the question of UI.

BTW I'm wrote not about user interface. I'm wrote about the possibilities one has using therion including automatic and correct multilevel roundtriping. And I know very well what it means. I tried in my life several programs to calculate the cave polygon, from punch card driven one. I drew several km of caves by hand to know what it means. And drew them in Illustrator too.

Main advantage of therion is, you will never lost your data just because the therion team "will die" or will die. Simple, readable, text file, as the therion files are, may interpret anybody else.

But we spoke about it many times, Luc.

I drew each level independently on map bellow, therion glued it together automatically. One may generate from that data map without details, map of each level separately, generate atlas with one level with details on each page, etc., etc,.

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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby lleblanc » Sep 19, 2011 2:31 pm

Martin Sluka wrote:Luc, there is nobody from both men they programmed therion, who is able to rewrite new interface. They are simple too busy. So if anybody is enough brave here, he/she may try it. Yes, it is written in C, anybody may download sources and check it. The part of program which generate maps use advantages of Metapost and TeX, but this is not the question of UI.


Without a doubt, this is the kind of advice the original poster was looking for...
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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Martin Sluka » Sep 20, 2011 11:11 am

lleblanc wrote:Without a doubt, this is the kind of advice the original poster was looking for...


You are righ Luc. With all that irony. But may you list another software which may produce the same as therion? Apart of GUI, please.
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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Marlatt » Mar 31, 2012 8:45 pm

Marlatt wrote:I spoke with Larry Fish several years ago about porting Compass to Mac, but at least at that time he wasn't particularly interested. However, I have run Compass on a Mac using Windows emulation (VirtualPC), and currently have it running on a dual-boot MacBook with Windows 7 installed. I don't know what hardware you are running, but you should be able to install Windoze onto any Intel-based Mac. (I tried to run Compass under OSX using WINE a couple years ago, with only partial success. It should be do-able, but I didn't have time to work at it)

Compass is a great program - I think you'll find it well worth your time to find an implementation!

Stuart



For what it is worth, I took another stab at running Compass on my MacPro this week. I re-installed Wine and Winetricks using macports (after re-installing and updating macports as well). Downloaded a new copy of Compass, installed it via the wine command line, and - lo and behold! - Compass is running flawlessly on my Mac! Not quite as smooth as on Windoze, but no complaints. Fantastic - I finally have Compass running on my preferred platform!

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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby driggs » Apr 2, 2012 11:56 am

Marlatt wrote:For what it is worth, I took another stab at running Compass on my MacPro this week. I re-installed Wine and Winetricks using macports (after re-installing and updating macports as well). Downloaded a new copy of Compass, installed it via the wine command line, and - lo and behold! - Compass is running flawlessly on my Mac! Not quite as smooth as on Windoze, but no complaints. Fantastic - I finally have Compass running on my preferred platform!


Be aware that if you're sharing data with Windows users, you may encounter "seemingly corrupt" files due to the different Operating Systems' handling of text file newlines. If Wine still provides the option, it may be safer to have it always write Windows-style CRLF newlines rather than your OS X (Unix) newlines.

There are several simple solutions for correcting the problem if it occurs, though OS X doesn't come with the handy `unix2dos` and `dos2unix` tools. You can fake them using the `tr` command. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Co ... _utilities
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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby Marlatt » Apr 2, 2012 2:02 pm

Good point, David. I go back and forth between Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac so frequently that I've written a number of tools for doing line termination corrections. Since most of the exportable/transferable files that you'd be working with when using Compass are simply ASCII text files, making these fixes is pretty simple.

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Re: Compass on a Mac?

Postby submassabielle » Aug 24, 2014 9:59 am

I need to buy a new computer and am (for the first time) leaning toward a Mac; but not strongly. With all the options, Mac seems to offer a high-quality package without sorting through tons of options. I am not at all tech savvy. Should the complications with compass dissuade me?
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