Splay handling in printing and export

[Olly Betts]

Currently splays are treated like any other leg by printing and export. It ought to be possible to hide them or display them in a different way to non-splay legs.

[Erin Lynch]

I found it particularly confusing when I was able to hide splays in aven, but they still appeared in the printout.

[Hugh St.Lawrence]

Any thoughts on when this might be resolved? Several people have mentioned it as a frustration, and it makes conventional drawing (e.g. Illustrator) particularly difficult when you can hardly make out the centreline from a great bunch of splays. Blame operators for that! but I think the 'centre line' should be sacred and certainly possible to output without splays - it really would make life a lot easier for some big cave projects which use conventional 2D drawing methods. There's an argument that LRUDs might be handy in a printout, so the ideal scenario is a dropdown or radio button choice of... a) export centreline only b) export centreline and LRUD c) export all

[Olly Betts]

With [ddcf5855abdd1654f44c576b2675f0dfe7a0c366/git] splays can be toggled on or off for printing and exports (and default to the current view state). When enabled, splays are shown in pale grey on printouts.

Still to do - distinguish splays in exports.

[Olly Betts]

[4e30a99a1b529aee462d2171e68a08b47f717acf/git] makes splays show thinner and in grey in SVG (same appearance as cross-sections) when enabled.

Other export formats still to do (at least those that provide a suitable way to distinguish splays).

[Erin Lynch]

In aven and when printing, it would be helpful if splay leg crosses behaved like surface leg crosses. When the splay legs are hidden, the splay crosses should be hidden regardless of whether or not crosses are toggled on for the main centreline.

[Olly Betts]

Good point.

We already have flags for whether a station is on a surface leg and/or an underground leg - we'll need another flag for stations which are on the end of a splay in order to efficiently implement this.

[Erin Lynch]

On the two printers I've used, "grey" splay legs don't print at all. Is there any way to disable this "feature"?

Commenting out occurrences of "*flags splay", is a partial work-around, but it doesn't help with legs which have "." as the "to" station. I've been installing 1.2.25 whenever I need to print, and then re-installing 1.2.30 for everything else.

I'd greatly appreciate an option to toggle between grey and black for splay legs in the print dialogue.

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

1.2.31 adds some handling for splays in extend.

[Olly Betts]

On the two printers I've used, "grey" splay legs don't print at all. Is there any way to disable this "feature"?

What platform is that on?

They were felt a bit pale on the CUCC expo last year, but certainly not invisible. I'm wondering if there's actually a platform-specific issue here.

[Olly Betts]

Pending further feedback, I've made the splays darker in 1.2.32.

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed

[Olly Betts]

Thanks to echarlie, DXF export now puts splays in a separate layer and uses a dotted linetype for them. Changes merged in commit a0866295c53ba698114a4732fe4f7ae03c19efdd.

[Olly Betts]

PLT export now flags splays with the S shot flag as part of adding support for this (seemingly new) Compass feature: 3ee5c477765d9e51c2ceb80ed0a77ad4b9c022cc (which will be in Survex 1.4.6)

I'll go through and itemise what's still to do here when I get a chance, but if there are particular cases where incomplete splay support in printing or export is annoying please flag them up and I'll try to prioritise those.

[Olly Betts]

All export formats which support choosing to export LEGS also support choosing SPLAYS (this ignores formats like Survex POS which only export station positions).

That may just allow the user to choose whether to export splays or not, but not to export them distinguished in some way (in a different layer, styled differently, etc) so checking each format:

• Survex 3d: splay flags are now included in the output (since 1.4.10 I think)
• DXF: splays in a separate layer
• PLT: splays get S shot flag
• HPGL: pushed simple tweak to use pen 2 for surface and pen 3 for splays: [87f6c0376e4c836027061f22b1fc45acdf583a9d]

Skencil seems to be an obsolete format. The last release of Skencil was in 2005. There was an attempt to revive the project in 2010, but that didn't lead to another release and seems to have petered out. No current Linux distro (or other package system) seems to have packages for it. The current git version still appears to require Python 2. Therefore I've completely removed support for exporting to it.

These don't currently distinguish splays in output:

• EPS: Could use a different line style or colour or width
• GPX: Not sure if there's a good way to distinguish
• JSON: Could export splays differently to traverses, but maybe we need to actually plan the design of this format
• KML: Could use a linestyle

KML seems the main priority of what's left.

[Olly Betts]

KML done in [e6ef6214b89cac3400cbe865cfe52ce551ae8e62].

GPX has <trk><type>TYPE</type>...</trk> where as best I can tell TYPE is an arbitrary string, but that's not useful unless GPX-reading devices and/or software does something appropriate if we specify it.