Support import of lat/lon data (Latitude, Longitude, Northing, Easting)

[weaker]

Hi,

thanks for CloudCompare, it is an incredibly powerful tool. I like it a lot!

I have text files with data in the following form that I would like to import:

Code: Select all

  8  4.42730086E	 44 15.72531556N	2.9859
  8  4.42726526E	 44 15.72533605N	2.9849

That is basically a tab/space separated list of geo-coordinates. The location is in latitude/longitude and they are given in degrees and in angular minutes. So the entry reads basically "8°4.42730086' East, 44°15.72531556' North, 2.9859 meters height/depth". This creates multiple issues:
- There is a letter E/N connected to the numbers inside the data field of the angular minutes without a separator.
- Two fields in the input data have to be combined for one output (i.e. "X coordinate" created from "degrees" and "minutes" field)
- It is critical to not lose any precision due to floating-point issues in the process. Otherwise quantization effects could ruin the cloud.

It would be awesome if this kind of import functionality was integrated in CloudCompare!

Best regards
weaker

[daniel]

Ah, that's a rather frequent expectation (being able to read/convert angular coordinates - not the funny format ;) but so far this has never made it to the top priority list. Mostly because of time and knowledge on our part. Maybe GDAL would be able to help with that?

Anyway, we should probably add that to the TODO list (if not already there), but it may take a while before anything happens sadly.

[weaker]

Thank you for your answer and for the consideration to take this onto the TODO list :-)

The funny format is the output from a tool that is common in the sonar community. It was not my idea to export data this way :-D