Bezitopo

A land surveying CAD package under development

Bezitopo is a project to create a CAD program designed for land surveying. Unlike general-purpose CAD programs with surveying programs built on top, it has the horizontal Euler spiral with a polynomial vertical curve as a native object. It can read coordinate files (PNEZD) and breaklines, construct a TIN, and draw contours.

Core features

  • Horizontal and vertical curves

    • Horizontal and vertical curves are native. This includes vertical curves up to the third degree and horizontal circular and spiral arcs. A vertical curve can be bent in a cylinder over a horizontal curve.
  • Consistent units

    • All measurements (except bearings/azimuths and deltas) are stored in coherent SI units regardless of the display units. To switch units, just click a button.
  • No crossing contours

    • Surfaces are made of curved triangles. Contours cannot spuriously cross as a result of smoothing.
    • When triangles are flat (e.g. the TIN is read from a PerfectTIN file), contours are smoothed referring to the surface with greater tolerance. They still can't cross. (In development.)
  • Geoid file conversion and excerpting (convertgeoid)

    • Reads and writes US NGS, US NGA, Carlson GSF, and Boldatni (Bezitopo's own format).
    • Writes an excerpt of a geoid file just big enough to contain, for example, all points within 150 km of Asheville.
    • Resamples a geoid file so that, for instance, the Alaska file is every 1 minute in latitude and every 2 minutes in longitude.
  • Approximation to spirals

    • Computes smooth piecewise circular approximations to spirals
    • Can be used to offset the alignment of a highway to provide boundary lines

Implemented Standards

  • Keyhole Markup Language (KML)
IndPark

Bezitopo News

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