History

The project started off in 1999 to write a program to produce assist cavers in drawing beautiful cave maps. Not something which produces 3D and allows virtual reality flights, but one that is more like a drawing package with features where the wall outlines could automatically update when the survey data is corrected for closures, implement a fine level of wall shape using fractals, add shading or texturing to the surrounds of walls and many wonderful things. Wouldn't you like a package which has styles where you can have a modern looking map using your own countries mapping standards yet change it easily to print out one using US based cave symbols or BCRA ones? What about one in the style of an early 20th century European map but using the latest symbols?

Alas I become side-tracked as I realised that what I would eventually need for such a project was a powerfull and extensible data format. Writing the data as an XML document appeared to be one way to go and CaveScript XML was created.

Cave Mapping using LaTeX

A preliminary "proof-of-concept" program was written in late 1999 to test out some algorithms on automatic wall adjustments for my cave mapping program. The program was a perl script which read in a simple text based cave map format and output a LaTeX format file which was then converted to Postscript. The perl program linked the wall detail with the Survex survey data which could be adjusted and the program re-run to regenerate the LaTeX/Postscript output. This program is not included as it is a bunch of Perl scripts which require LaTeX as an intermediary to the Postscript output.

Postscript printouts "before" and "after" show cave walls nicely follow the survey legs as loops are closed or survey shots corrected. You can have a look at the results here with these PDF files; a before map and an after map. Here is the Survex survey data that the map is based on and the wall data file. Note that this data format is now superceded by the XML based data format.

However LaTeX was designed for text processing and the requirement for LaTeX to be able to read and interpret cave data places constraints on the data format. Ensuring portability and extensibility is difficult. That's why the data format for CaveScript will be in an XML format. An advanced cave mapping application that does use TeX can be found at Therion.

XML DTD to XML Schema

July 2000
Martin Laverty re-casts the XML DTDs into Schemas. As Martin says in the Glossary on his website: "XML Schema - an XML successor to the DTD for describing the structure and content of XML files. The allowable content can be defined in much more detail so as to increase confidence in the validity of data."

Martin has also created an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations). This will enable appplications to transform documents from one XML vocabulary (such as CaveScript) to another. This could be a plain text, non XML output such as Survex files, Walls file etc.