.. TotalOpenStation documentation master file, created by sphinx-quickstart on Sat May 24 15:43:10 2008.
   You can adapt this file completely to your liking, but it should at least
   contain the root `toctree` directive.

====================
 Total Open Station
====================

Total Open Station (TOPS for friends) is a free software program for
downloading and processing data from total station devices.

This is a task which is usually done by proprietary, dedicated and
Windows™-only software, but TOPS is different by nature, because:

- it is *free software* released under the GNU GPLv3 license;
- it works on *any* operating system, including mobile platforms like
  OpenMoko;
- it is designed to support as many devices and formats as possible, all
  within the same program, opposed to having one program per device.

Every model has its own quirks, but TOPS uses a modular structure and
keeps the downloading of data logically separated from its processing,
thus enabling exporting data to a variety of output formats, even at a
later moment. Archiving of raw data is made easy by using plain text
files.

:ref:`users` are a growing number, you can be the next. See which
:ref:`models` are already supported.

Getting Total Open Station
==========================

Total Open Station is in a early phase of development and there isn't
a stable release available yet.

You can download the latest development “tip” either as a `compressed
source archive`_ or directly with Mercurial::

  hg clone https://bitbucket.org/steko/totalopenstation

.. _`compressed source archive`: https://bitbucket.org/steko/totalopenstation/get/tip.zip 

If you are on Windows, the recommended way to install is using the
binary installer available at PyPI_. Detailed instructions are
available at the page about :ref:`installing`.

.. _PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/totalopenstation#downloads

.. warning::

   This is alpha quality code, it might behave in unexpected ways,
   crash your system or just don't work at all.

Binary installable packages are planned. requires
using the command-line, but it is definitely easy.

Documentation
=============

The :ref:`contents` includes both the user's manual and the
developer's manual, and it is made with Sphinx_, as the whole website.

.. _Sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

Help and support
================

If you're experiencing problems with TOPS, try first our :ref:`faq`.

Community support is available through the `mailing list`_. Subscribe
to request support for new models or submit bugs.

.. _`mailing list`: https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/tops-dev

Who is doing this?
==================

Total Open Station is mainly developed as part of the IOSA_ project by
Stefano Costa and Luca Bianconi, archaeologists.

.. _IOSA: http://www.iosa.it/

Total Open Station is licensed under the GNU General Public License
version 3.

The application icons are copyright by Lapo Calamandrei 2008.
