I think all that it would take to make a cruise grid is to define or make a call to the theme you want to base the grid on so the boundaries are defined and use a matrix (DIM() array function) to populate a table with X,Y positions based on the projection and have them display as dots in a new theme. It has scripting available and a SDK included. I never did much scripting and none in Maptitude. It seems like their programs are written for users that do nothing but GIS and Database management. Our IT guys are sold on ESRI and folks like me suffer every day. Our IT group has not written new scripts for ARCMap yet and it has been 18 month since we changed. We have to create our cruise grids using the old ARCview. We had a script written to do it in ARCView 3.2 but we have since "upgraded" to ARCMap and lost that function as well as many other tools our department has created specific for forestry applications. ARCMap is not capable of producing a cruise grid. That ESRI limited function for a high price keeps numerous folks employed writing scripts to complete simple functions. Anyone starting a new company now would be money ahead, even though ESRI dropped their price, to look elsewhere for their GIS program. One company I did work for had ARCInfo but they did allot of contract government work back in the 90's. It seems like government agencies are really the only ones sold on ESRI. The only reasons they dropped the price from $6000 to $1500 was that others were providing more value for a lot less. I got the feeling that dealing with those guys you had to give up the gold for public domain information that only had about 10 sentences of code. Even Trimble Pathfinder had it long before ESRI, ArcInfo has been used by DNR for almost 30 years on Unix. It finally got added to ESRI products such as Arcpad, ArcGIS after years of complaining. I couldn't even get that information needed to plug into the utility anywhere. Most GIS don't and in ESRI you had to know what settings to use in some obscure utility to convert from WGS84 to our provincial projection. Also, it has New Brunswick Double Stereographic projection. I can even digitize a paper map or aerial photo with control points on screen. Even adding an external database table is easier. And there are probably 20 or more other GIS formats it brings in.
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