Copyright © 1998-2002 by Olly Betts
$Date: 2002/04/05 14:26:57 $
This is the manual for Survex - an open-source software package for cave surveyors.
The master version of this manual is an SGML document written using the docbook DTD, then automatically converted to a number of other formats. If you're making major changes, it's much easier to apply them if you work with this master, which you can get from the source archive or the Survex website.
Survex is a multi-platform open-source cave surveying package. It currently runs on UNIX, Microsoft Windows 95/NT and successors, DOS, and Acorn RISC OS machines.
We are well aware that not everyone has access to super hardware - often surveying projects are run on little or no budget and any computers used are donated. We aim to ensure that Survex is feasible to use on low-spec machines, although you may not be able to process vast cave systems, and some facilities may be restricted. Please help us to achieve this by giving us some feedback if you use Survex on a slow machine.
Survex is capable of processing extremely complex caves very quickly and has a very effective, real-time cave viewer which allows you to rotate, zoom, and pan the cave using mouse or keyboard. We have tested it extensively using CUCC and ARGE's surveys of the caves under the Loser Plateau in Austria (over 11,500 survey legs, and over 66km of underground survey data). This can all be processed in a few seconds on a low-end Pentium machine. Survex is also used by many other survey projects around the world, including the Ogof Draenen survey, the Easegill resurvey project, the OFD survey, the OUCC Picos expeditions, and the Hong Meigui China expedition.
Survex is still actively being worked on. Version 1.0 is complete in some sense, but development will continue - initially in reshaping Survex into a more integrated GUI package.
We encourage feedback from users on important features or problems, which will help to direct future development. Contact addresses are near the bottom of this document.
Throughout this document we use British terminology for surveying.
a point in the cave that you survey from and/or to
a line joining two stations
a group of legs surveyed on the same trip
when talking about the survey network, we talk about an n-node to describe the number of connections to a station. So a 1-node is a station with only 1 leg to or from it - i.e. The end of a passage or survey. A 2-node is a typical station along a passage with a survey leg coming into it, and one going out. A 3-node is a station with three legs joining it, e.g. at a T-junction. And so on.
Next | ||
Getting Started |