A LETTER FROM A HAPPY R2V USER
A Letter written to us by Mr. Paul Hastings, Director of the Environmental Information Center, Thailand Environment Institute
Dear Able Software:
We at the Environmental Information Center (EIC) of Thailand's Environment Institute, are currently making daily, production-type use of R2V for Windows (32-bit version) on 7 workstations since early 1995. We're primarily using Able Software's R2V for Windows to automate data capture of contours from black-and-white photo separates of 1:50,000 scale topographic maps and urban scale (1:4,000) city maps for a pollution control project covering 25 provinces in Central Thailand.
We found R2V for Windows to be very useful in capturing and identifying line work from these maps for final input into an Arc/Info database. Overall we are quite pleased with R2V for Windows in its present form as well as the future direction the product seems to be taking. The responsiveness of Able Software to user requests for additional functionality is a refreshing change from the normal take-it-or-leave-it attitude of many software vendors, and we are convinced by the fact that Able Software really wants to help users succeed.
In the past, it would take us about 10 days to manually digitize and edit a dense contour map. R2V for Windows has cut this task down to about 2-3 days. The combined use of the fully automatic vectorization and the powerful on-screen Line Editor has improved our productivity in digitizing large number of large format maps. Further more, we found that the final database products using R2V for Windows are of much higher fidelity than those which were produced manually.
We had prior experience using or evaluating several products, such as Hitachi's CadCore Tracer package and other Unix-based packages, and we have concluded that R2V for Windows is far more superior in terms of ease of use, applicability to GIS and mapping, speed, and price. The reliability of R2V for Windows has been really impressive, as we have pounded on the software in a real production environment for more than 2 years with no failures.
Finally, I'd like to thank you for adding functions for us, such as the contour line labeling, the raster image editing and raster image georeferencing, and text area detection. The contour line labeling function is being used all the time and a real time saver. I am sure these functions will be very useful for other users too. In the past, new releases have come out on a quarterly basis and I hope you can keep this pace in the future. I look forward to seeing new features and developments in R2V.
Paul Hastings
Director of the Environmental Information Center
Thailand Environmental Institute (TEI)
Email: paul@tei.or.th