[Incubator] Bezitopo and PerfectTIN

[Pierre Abbat]

I've written some programs and would like to start incubating them.

Bezitopo is a project to create a CAD program specifically for land surveying. 
I've been working on it for a little over twelve years and have built a lot of 
infrastructure. It can read a list of points (such as ground shots) and make a 
TIN, then you can flip edges and designate them as breaklines and draw 
contours. It converts coordinates from lat-long to state plane (only in North 
Carolina and Georgia so far) and back.

PerfectTIN reads a point cloud in LAS format (I'm going to fork libplyxx with 
the new name plytapus, and then it should also be able to read PLY on multiple 
platforms; right now that's available only on Linux) and converts it to a TIN, 
which it can export in several formats (not including PLY, but that should be 
easy to add). I started the project less than a year ago by copying code from 
Bezitopo and modifying the classes (PerfectTIN's triangles have point cloud 
dots, Bezitopo's don't; Bezitopo's points have descriptions, PerfectTIN's 
don't). It is now good enough to sell; I should be getting some money within a 
month or two from someone I know selling it along with other software to drone 
users. I also have an offer (but no number yet) from another company for 
developing specific features in it.

Both programs are LGPL-licensed (which implies that the drone users will be 
getting a source tarball with the Windows binary) and published on my GitHub 
site. SiteCheck, one of the Bezitopo programs, can read TIN files generated by 
PerfectTIN and tell the elevation at any xy coordinate in the TIN. They are in 
C++, with mixed style, as my style has changed over the years I've been 
working on Bezitopo. Both use Qt, except the CLI PerfectTIN program.

One of the criteria for incubation is accepting contributions to the source 
code. I'm willing to accept contributions, but there haven't been any. There 
are several things to do that don't involve coding C++:
*Drawing three foot icons
*Translations (I do English and Spanish, and the company has dibs on another 
language)
*Entering other coordinate systems (Gauss-Krüger transverse Mercator and 
Lambert conformal conic are supported; for oblique Mercator I have to find out 
mathematically what it is and whether there's more than one).

Pierre
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