Emit and SI confidence

[FatBoy]

Just to clarify I was saying that Ocad 9 includes many features which closes the gap on what Illustrator does (namely anti-alias, raster images). I have no idea of how good it is at importing Illustrator files - never done it.

[stodge]

Lots of options for importing the illustrator files. - DXF, PDF, AI, EMF - would need some testing - possibly via a 3rd party product, But for course planning just export a 300 dpi Jpeg from illustrator, then use that as a background file...

Using Illustrator is fine - until that person as a resource no longer exists and someone else has to pick up the batton who does not have those skills.


We are getting hugley off topic here...

[swat]

Yes, that's the workflow I eventually arrived at for Baildon - just use an image file exported from Adobe as a background then plan on top of that in OCAD. Seabird - I didn't need the paper copies at all in the end. Remaining issues were: larger file size when emailing the map around, plus reliance on going back to the original mapper to produce the print version of the courses.

Sorry for staying off topic!

[Paul Frost]

All this brings us back to problem of interchangeable data between applications.

The need to share data is greater now than at any other time, so perhaps we all need to move to software that can "play nicely" with what are now considered the "standards".
This may mean learning new applications, but in the longer term it will reduce the number of problems we are having to deal with at the moment.

All we need now is someone to define what "standards" we should be aiming for!

Perhaps a starting point would be to ascertain what software each club is currently using and if they are happy with it.

[swat]

OK, for Airienteers we use:

Maps drawn in:
OCAD, Illustrator
Courses planned in:
Ocad
Online entries in:
Fabian
Event management by:
Aut-O-Download including Live Results
Results in:
This bit very much depends on which of the three SI managment teams are doing the event. If it's me I do: web (HTML) edited by hand from Aut-O-Download to include links to RouteGadget, Winsplits, Splitsbrowser plus create link on BOF results page, maybe send results in different formats to organiser to print paper copy and/or YHOA Gallopen results complier. Otherwise it might just be HTML results only.

[Paul Frost]

Hold tight everyone!

Before we get everyone posting their list of applications used in a random fashion, let's think about it.

What would be useful is if someone could set up a web page questionnaire that collected the data and put into a database. This would allow easier analysis of the data. I am tempted to offer to do this, but I am in the middle of moving to Scotland permanently (rather than my half 'n' half at the moment), and in the middle of re-developing the SOA website. So if anyone else could set something up it might happen a bit quicker.

I suppose that some people would say BOF should be doing this, but as we keep being told "we are all BOF"!

[stodge]

Thanks to seabird - I was talking rubbish about OCAD not doing map exchanges.... it does