iDraw Archaeological Features on the iPad

Tracing Rocks in iDraw

On screen digitizing took a turn for the fun this past week when I started using the iDraw app on my iPad to trace feature maps for the report I'm working on.  After more than two weeks of point and click tracing in Adobe Illustrator with the mouse, the switch to the stylus and iDraw seemed like a vacation.  I feel like a kid who gets to do all my homework for the next week on an etch-a-sketch. Fun!

The green insert shows the scanned paper map

iDraw is excellent for tracing drawings or maps which can be scanned as a single .jpg.  Many of the feature maps that I used Adobe Illustrator for were stitched together from many small overlapping maps.  Some of the rocks that I was tracing were represented on more than one hand drawn map and I wanted to be able to flip between all those different source layers as I made the final digital version.  You can't do that on iDraw, yet.  As far as I'm aware, you can only have a single .jpg as your base layer.  That limits the number of maps I can digitize this way, but for the ones that do fit into this category, the program works great.

A photo of the feature, iDraw profile, source .jpg

iDraw is a vector drawing program, comparable to a streamlined Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.  You work in layers and all the information that you create in the app can be imported into programs like Adobe Illustrator as .pdf or .svg files.  There's a bit of a hiccup in opening the files in Illustrator on a PC, but once you know to expect it, its not that much of a hardship:  The individual layers from iDraw have all disappeared and all the information from each layer is grouped together into one layer.  At first it looks like you've lost all the layer info, but that's not really the case.  All the objects from each layer are locked together into separate groups, so you can select the contents of each iDraw layer with a single mouse click and copy them into a new Illustrator layer.  My maps are fairly simple at this point, with only 3-6 layers, so it only takes a few seconds to select each group of objects and paste them all onto their own layers again.  I'm not sure if this happens when opening iDraw files on a Mac.

This took less than an hour to trace

My first impression of using the iPad as a digitizing tablet is that its not as blisteringly fast as I was anticipating.  Drawing is faster, but only slightly quicker than using the mouse.  However, its so much more intuitive and comfortable to use than I was expecting, that at the end of the day, I have more maps done than I thought.  I don't dread starting the really big complex maps, because I know I won't be trapped in a chair at a desk all day.  My earliest experience with digitizing maps was using a puck on a big drafting table in a university computer lab.  With the iPad, you could do the same thing in a park or a big comfy chair.  Its a more enjoyable experience, so I take fewer breaks, so I get more work done in less time.

Stylus improves accuracy

I think one of the reasons that the actual digitizing is a little slower than I expected is that I haven't figured out how to turn off the auto rounding on the continuous draw Pencil.  I can't just trace around the rocks in one swipe, because the line doesn't want to close itself into a continuous polygon and iDraw smooths out the curves into an artistic flourish.  To accurately trace the rocks you need to tap, tap, tap with the Pen and connect the dots.  Its not hard, its just slightly slower.  Although I do like the Pencil's artistic flourishes for going back and quickly adding surface details to the rocks to give the illusion of a 3D object, rather than just a hollow polygon.  Its very easy to zoom in and out of the drawing for more detail on tricky places, but its still a good idea to use a stylus to help with your accuracy.

I find moving file with Dropbox simplest

I want to integrate the maps done on the iPad with the other maps that I did in Adobe Illustrator, so I'm not finishing the maps in iDraw.  When I get all the information traced off the base map I save it to my Dropbox folder and by the time I walk over to my laptop, its there waiting for me.  I'll do my final tweaking, scaling and labelling in AI.  Even with transferring files between platforms and programs, its still faster and more enjoyable to do as much of the grunt work on the iPad as possible.  For next season's work, I'll be thinking of ways to make more field drawings suitable for digitizing on the iPad.

Photo Credit:
1,5: Lori White
2-4,6: Tim Rast