Discussion: Purple Pen tutorial video

Hi all,

The Columbia River Orienteering Club (croc.org, aka moi) made a tutorial video on Purple Pen. I am certainly no expert on using the software, but it does cover the basics for someone who is trying to learn it for the first time to do some simple course setting. You can find by searching YouTube for purple pen, get to it from the CROC website under Get Better, or go right here for the link. Feel free to pass this along to anyone in your club who would like to get up to speed quickly on this helpful software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRMByZhgspI

One quick comment--
You do not have to start with an OCAD file. You can use an jpeg instead

Or an OOM file, with the newest version!

Thanks for those comments folks, they are correct. Like I said, I no expert on this, and helpful supporting commentary is welcome. I just wanted to put together a Purple Pen 101 for people with zero experience, mostly in my club, all of whom who are using one of our OCAD maps as a base. Hopefully some other people might find this video helpful, if you are trying to involve more people in your club in course setting.

I think you can also use a PDF map but I've not been able to because it requires downloading another piece of software that I've yet to be able to install.

You can use a pdf, but PP requires that you have GPL Ghostscript loaded on your computer.

Yeah that's the one I've been unable to install.

Version 3, still in beta I believe, "no longer requires the download of GPL Ghostscript for reading PDF files".

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody. Regarding the PDF file, it's easy to convert a PDF to a JPEG, which you should then be able to load as a base layer map. Just do a Google for "pdf to jpg" to find lots of web utilities that can do this.

The whole idea here is the easier we can make it to use mapping and course settings software, the more people might be tempted to step up and do it. Having some basic tutorial videos would be a big help . . . Does anyone know a good one on OCAD?

The Junior Mapper's Guide is an introduction to the mapping process, but the beginning mapper will probably want to use Open Orienteering Mapper