Paul, I know your problem exactly. I survey caves as a hobby and have to plot the survey data in exactly the fashion you describe, before fleshing out the details of the cave. Sometimes there are dozens of survey legs to draw. I have often tried Inkscape for this purpose, especially earlier this year, but am always totally frustrated by it. I now use Xara and it works beautifully for this purpose, as well as being incredibly fast. The key here is to be able to snap onto the end of the first leg before laying out the second leg etcetera. Inkscape could not do this last time I looked whereas Xara can. There may be klunky workarounds but as you know when you have many legs to process this rapidly becomes unworkable. At the other end of the process Inkscape is good at detail in the cave maps but it becomes bogged down and dreadfully slow. I feel until some of the speed issues are addressed that I will simply not use it due to time constraints even though I would like to be able to.
By the way, there are many programs that have been developed to plot cave survey data. Some of these are free or effectively so. The best of the programs "Walls", uses a round tripping process to update the map, including the drawn detail, when incorrect legs are updated. This program outputs SVG but needs Illustrator 10 as well at present.
regards, Erik
----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Hirose" <j4n3a-31309-rcvk4@...99...> To: "Inkscape list" inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2005 4:06 AM Subject: [Inkscape-user] navigational plotting
I'm having trouble drawing a path depicting a vessel's movements. For example, from some starting point, go 123 miles on course 091°, thence 73 miles on course 346°, etc.
Drawing any single leg of the trip is no problem. I can make a straight line of a given length, then rotate it to the correct orientation. However, creating these legs individually and placing them end to end gives the diagram a klugey look. The corners don't have the perfect appearance of a path created by successive clicks with the pen tool.
I can get the diagram just right by first roughing out the path by eye, then using the Inkscape XML edit feature to modify the node coordinates. To get the correct numbers I perform vector math on a calculator. This is laborious and blunder-prone. Is there a better way?