Martin Thanks for posting Jan Tulis map. It is one I would be proud to have produced.
It looks like a lot of work for a very small section of cave, very detailed! Something we New Zealanders have come to expect from European cavers. I abandoned involvement in cave map production early 1990s when it became obvious that centerline software and paper map development had outlived it's usefulness. In areas under active exploration we had multiple disconnected maps with large gaps and lost data, and fulltime map re-drafters who spent their life drawing and re-drawing cave maps as our knowledge of the caves grew. These people burned out, and after some years someone else might take over, but with lots of data lost in the mean time. Sound like the storey on the front page of the Therion web site? I tried to make AutoCAD do the job that Therion now does, but lacked time, knowledge and skill. Therion is my savior! I've waited over 15 years for you. My experience so far? You're free, have a dedicated development team, can be easily used collaboratively by a team of cave surveyors, and so long as documentation is done along with the survey process (not waiting 12 years like we have) should be no more difficult than doing it on paper. And you can produce many versions of a map with little more than the push of a button. There are a few minor shortcomings which have more than the appearance of being considered and worked through. The considerable effort I have put in to learning Therion so far is no more than it would have taken to draw my current cave project on paper, and the bonus is that it is unlikely to be wasted time, provided I save the install file with the data :) I consider all of my time put into paper maps of cave systems (isolated caves less than 1km excepted) has been completely wasted. They are all obsolete now, and some poor unfortunate may be foolish enough to try to find, pull together, and publish it properly (electronically) one day. Thanks Martin and Stacho, and every one else contributing to Therion. PS; Jonathan, Marco, thanks for the descriptions of your data layout. I'll describe what I do when I get some more time. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.speleo.sk/pipermail/therion/attachments/20080425/f764f347/attachment.html>
