Discussion: Copy of OCAD

I've decided to buy/acquire a copy of OCAD. OCAD 12 is a bit pricey at $1400 for the full version, so I though I'd ask if anyone has an old version that I could buy (licenses are transferrable), before I pay full retail for v12?
Thanks.

That $ figure sounds too high. It may be a bells and whistles version. I've never needed more than the standard version (now called the orienteering version, I think).

Are you looking for the Professional version or trying to do orienteering maps? For the latter it suffices to use the OCAD Orienteering 12 for CHF 580 new. It is still a full version, as compared to the starter version, what orienteering is concerned.

I am not sure if this would be against ocad's rules?

I always assumed that when I paid to upgrade from (say) v10 to v11, instead of buying a new copy, that my old v10 would no longer be transferable?

You can always go way back to OCAD 6.
You might be able to join a club that has an OCAD 8 club license and use it.
You could say to heck with OCAD, Open Orienteering Mapper has all the features you need.
I bought OCAD 12 standard a little over a year ago. It was about half the price you quoted.

I'm doing more than mapping o courses and I need the SHP/DXF file import features. OOM doesn't do SHP files and does DXF very poorly. OCAD Orienteering does both for about $580, so it may work. I need to look at the extended feature set.

You can transfer an old license, but not if you upgraded it, only if you are no longer using it. I think I need at least version 9 to get the features I want.

As of upgrade 12.1.2, the OCAD Orienteering 12 can also import shape files. And it has been doing dxf files well already for earlier versions than 12. And you can have it installed on 2 computers at a time. So I have one on a tablet that I use for field checking, and one on my laptop.

The Orienteering version of Ocad also now has support for Open Street Map.

Current price is $580. Order can be place by contacting me Ocad's North American sales and support person.

edhicks@orienteeringunlimited.com

Thanks! Need to do a few more checks of things before I commit, but I think the Orienteering version will work if I can work out exporting SHP files (export DXF and then convert to SHP).

Our association bought two licenses for OCAD 12 recently but I forget how much we paid for them so that's not much use to you.

If you qualify the academic version is less expensive (`$1000) and comes with 20 licenses. Ed Hicks (Orienteering Unlimited) has an agreement where he can sell the academic version to a Scout Unit. You might discuss this further with him or "mapman".

David Fisher

Recently, I was also interested to use OOM with the shp file import feature, someone on their forum told me it works in a beta version but I never managed to get it work..anyone tried?

As of a few weeks ago the development versions of OOM have included GDAL code for DXF import, but you have to enable it in setting first.

When you do that it is in fact quite easy to import contours, vegetation and top point/line/area symbols from a DXF file, and you can also get everything properly georeferenced. (Don't try to use the automatic UTM zone discovery since that messed up the import the last time I tried it.)

I am encouraging youngsters here in Norway to use this setup to create local park & school maps using 100% free sw and the new open LiDAR which will cover the entire country when the project is completed.

Open lidar everywhere. Sounds nice. It's a great resource where we have it here in Colorado, which is actually quite a bit of terrain. But I digress.