A survey text file contains 4 comment lines, units (in this example, feet), your name (David Kimball), and the date it was typed in, followed by alternating lines of bearings and distances in their respective formats (note that curves are also stored as two lines, but in a different format). The file may end with a few blank lines.

Here is an example of a survey text file:


State Forests and Parks, Ripton, MA.
Q. McGillicuddy.  10.01 Acres.
Whole parcel beginning with northernmost course.
Surveyor:  Wadsworth Surveyors, Inc.  Surveyed:  10-27-1993.  (3-113)
feet
David Kimball
9/9/1999
s89-27-00e
1155.00
s27-22-42w
429.24
s86-45-10w
964.67
cr
r 100 a 53.6
n00-41-53e
446.89

The four comment lines contain content as suggested by the dialog help (hold the mouse over the comment fields when you have the Survey Entry dialog open--these suggestions will appear along the bottom of the ArcView window).

If you prefer, you can type a survey text file directly into any text editor if you feel confident that you will not make typographical errors (you must save the file as text - *.txt). The advantages of using the survey entry dialog are that it will not let you enter a syntactically incorrect survey course, and you can test your surveys when done. (Of course, it can't catch all user errors!)

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