Up spake Erik:
Can Inkscape plot survey data at present? What I mean is: Can we lay down a line A to B with a distance in say metres and a bearing relative to North vertical and plotted clockwise? And then a line B to C etcetera. The sort of data it would be valuable to plot are:
Point Point Distance (metres or scaled) Bearing (angle clockwise in degrees from vertical) A B 12.5 25 B C 4.3 328 C D 16.7 85 D E 8.6 45.2
To do this we need lines to be drawn in terms of distance and angle rather than what appears to be the current X and Y positions of the point. Maybe this can be set at present.
We have "cartesian coordinates". You want "polar coordinates".
I can find no mention of polar coordinates in the SVG 1.1 index[1] or by grepping the SVG 1.0 standard (which I have locally) for "polar".
You could emulate polar coordinates by doing something like <transform scale="20" rotate="20"><path d="M 0 0 h 1"></>
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/indexlist.html