Mapping software (Fri Apr 26 11:42:54 2002)

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

> display vector information from a survey and overlay it onto
> scanned maps ...

I have always done this with !Draw, which handles sprite or jpeg bitmaps
(and almost anything else can be converted to these with !ChangeFSI or one
of several other (commercial) programs like !ImgMaster). In the "old" days,
the vector files were hand built. Later, they were built with noddy BASIC
programs (anyone can write one in a few hours). Perhaps easiest now is to
print from Survex using the postscript driver and import the postscript to
!Draw format with something like !EPSobject. It would be very
straightforward to modify the Survex postscript driver to produce !Draw
output directly - in fact I've been meaning to do it for many years but I
use this sort of overlay sufficiently infrequently that it has never seemed
worth the few hours effort involved...

All the above software is either free or comes bundled with the OS. The only
tiny disadvantage to all this stuff is that not everyone has a computer that
runs RISC OS. But not everyone has a computer that runs Windows, either, and
that doesn't seem to stop people making wrong assumptions ;-)

Andy