Cavers,
The workshop at the Texas Speleological Survey office was a success and will be repeated hopefully this next spring. Below is a report produced by instructor Leslie Bell. The TSS Survey Mapping Workshop was held on Saturday, September 24, 2011 from 10:30AM to 5:30PM. Jim Kennedy and Leslie Bell taught the workshop, and Rod Goke and Christopher Francke helped with the setup and IT support. The digital projector used during the workshop was provided by Jim Kennedy. The workshop had three attendees: Rick Corbell from San Antonio, TX Gary Franklin from Austin, TX Karen Masters from Austin, TX The first half of the workshop covered scanning paper maps and taking them into GIMP to clean up the scanned maps. GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. Corresponding actions in Adobe Photoshop (a popular but more expensive raster graphics editor) were also shown to the attendees. As all of the TSS computers have been set up with GIMP, each of the three attendees used the information given to them to clean up scanned Williamson County maps. The workshop then broke for lunch at Pho Hoang. The second half of the workshop covered entering survey data into WALLS, exporting a line plot from WALLS and then taking that line plot and creating an official profile or plan map using Inkscape, a free software vector graphics editor. Although there were only a few attendees, each of those attendees did get to learn valuable information that they can use in the future and will now have the tools in their arsenal to draft their own maps and submit them to the TSS. Jim Kennedy and Leslie Bell both agree the workshop was a general success and would like to see more workshops in the future. Although there were no donations given, attendees did pay for their own lunches at Pho Hoang. Tutorials for GIMP and WALLS were drafted for the workshop and future workshops will be able to include and build on these tutorials.
