Discussion: Is the death of OCAD near?

Maybe not but this is very interesting...

http://www.saabgroup.com/Campaigns/Rapid-3D-Mappin...

Not something I would associate the name Saab with. Surprise....

Saab was an aircraft company before they made autos, IIRC. Maybe this is connected with an aviation interest. Remember, some flying device like a drone has to be involved.

Well, the Saab Automobile company that most people associate with "Saab" is very near death indeed (the last hope is getting GM to accept a complete sale to the Chinese - which seems highly unlikely today). Saab Group, with the page linked above, or Saab AB as the formal company name is, is primarily an aerospace and defense company e.g. making fighter jets for the Swedish Air force, so this kind of project is not surprising at all.

I wonder if it has the quirky equivalent of ignition-in-the-middle somewhere... ;-)

Sorry guys - but O maps need more than some fancy digital fly-by! What makes a good O map is time on the ground by a competent experienced mapper. Its a lot cheaper than flying aircraft over the ground as well!

It doesn't look like a replacement for 0CAD to me at all, but rather a potential way to generate basemaps. I also suspect that it's not at all inexpensive.

Maybe someone who does canoe O could say would it be good for mapping rapids.

This software would make a great base map when combined with an octocopter and 3D Lidar...

Excellent for base maps. Ocad will not die yet. It is not a mapping program. It is a map designing program: it helps you design maps. It has definitely improved with the 10 version and it might look like a mapping program but it still is a map designing program. Lidar is really helping us finally produce accurate orienteering maps, at least, it is making us produce geo-referenced maps. GPS and Lidar will also lower the costs for the map-making.

I would describe OCAD as a map drafting prorgam. It is indeed not a cartography package.

I think that the impact of OCAD on the orienteering world has been significant, in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and not always positive. The non-positive angle comes from putting paper/perspective first, and not starting to place emphasis on hard data accuracy until Version 10, if that. For example, a lot of present-day, experienced mappers don't think twice about F9'ing things to make them fit, which makes me cringe since these things that they are F9'ing with have been duly orthorectified.

If you haven't seen this video showing potential use of this system in the military, take a look.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/1267586032001/exclusive...

Vlad, I haven't done a lot of mapping yet, so please explain the F9'ing. Thanks!

F9 is the OCAD shortcut key for adjusting the background image - he's talking about fiddling georeferenced/orthorectified images to make them fit the map, rather than making the map fit the (more accurate in real world) image.

Well, that would be cool to have.

The F9 tab should be taken off the Ocad program. I also agree that there is so much use of the F9 tab by experienced mappers.

The F9 tab should be taken off the Ocad program.

*blink* I think you need to calm down a bit there. How would you suggest we line up non-orthorectified imagery without the use of the F9 tool?

I was trying to point out that the concept was originally turned on its head, with no easy way to get at the correct end of the concept at all. What I really want is to be able to easily transform the map, i.e. the drafted orienteering symbols, to fit a set of hard data. Instead OCAD offers the opposite. This approach was understandable when hard data was not readily available, but is out of place now. Surely a decent cartography package should offer both ways of transforming things...

It's easily possible (in OCAD 10, at least), to transform the map, as opposed to the background image. See the OCAD "how-to" called "Georeference a map (OCAD 10)". There's also one called "Georeference a map (OCAD 9)" so this option appears to be available in 9 as well, although I've only worked with it in 10.

Yes, but there were 8 (well, more like 5, but still) versions before 9 to foster a certain mentality. Most mappers have been working in OCAD for close to two decades, and the mentality doesn't die easily.

Okay...but as you said, matching the image to the map made sense before georeferenced data was readily available. Now that it is, OCAD 9 & 10 both have the exact feature you want:

What I really want is to be able to easily transform the map, i.e. the drafted orienteering symbols, to fit a set of hard data.

...so if it's not being used, isn't that a problem with the mapper rather than the program?

For the record, I had no idea OCAD 9 had that Transform feature. Yay, I've learnt my new thing for the day. :D

In OCAD, you can select a group of symbols (or the entire map), and drag them or stretch them to fit a georeferenced orthoquad. I have georeferenced an older map this way.
Still, OCAD is mainly a map drawing program, not a GIS. Fortunately the runners will never know if your map is correctly georeferenced or not.

If I understand right we have done about same "transformation" using rotate, strecth and move tools to make it fit on one correct backround reference since ocad 5. Before real world coordinates it was just keeping/making it right as whole without internal errors. As far as I can that transformation hasn't changed anything (latest version with rubbersheet transformation sure gives tools for correcting old skewed maps).

Still, OCAD is mainly a map drawing program, not a GIS. Fortunately the runners will never know if your map is correctly georeferenced or not.

Runners may never know, but it makes a lot of things easier for map maintenance. As new data sources become available, or someone 5 years down the road wants to make updates, it is nice be able to bring in a datalayer without messing around with it. If you do it right, there is also no guessing what magnetic declination was used when the map was made.
It also makes doing things like this much easier.

It's not so much that 0CAD didn't do it right in the first place as that 0CAD didn't leapfrog the state of the technology at the time. It was initially a replacement for drawing maps on sheets of mylar with pen and ink, and it did a pretty fine job. As things progressed all around (the emergence of GPS among other things), 0CAD added features to keep up, but the old capabilities are still there as well, for the most part. That means that a mapper can still just use it as a replacement for pen and ink if he wants to.

There's a guy who works in my building who doesn't really know how to use a computer, and can't get his head around it. He has a woman come in once a week and print out all of the emails that he has received so that he can read them in hardcopy. This is clearly a bogus way to operate, but I don't fault the email program for having a print function.