About Survex

Survex is a multi-platform open-source cave surveying package. currently runs on UNIX, Microsoft Windows 95/NT and successors, Mac OS X, DOS, and Acorn RISC OS machines. We're investigating support for various palmtop devices.

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. Obviously it won't be as responsive, but we intend it to be usable. 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 expeditions.

Survex is still actively being worked on. Version 1.0 is complete in some sense, but development continues - 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 at the end of this manual.

About this Manual

If there's a part of this manual you find hard to understand, please do let us know. We already know Survex well, so it can be hard for us to spot areas where the manual doesn't given enough information, or doesn't explain things clearly enough to follow when you don't know what's going on. It's helpful is you can suggest a better wording, but don't worry if you can't, just explain the problem as precisely as you can.

The master version of this manual is an SGML document written using the docbook DTD, and automatically converted to a number of other formats. If you are going to send us major changes, it's much easier to include them if you work from this master. You can get it from the source archive (docs/manual.sgml) or from the Survex website.