Tag Archives: Course Setting

Course Setting: Difference between Courses and Classes

In OCAD you can either work with Courses only or you can use Courses and Classes. Different Classes may use the same Course, e.g. ‘Course A‘ -> Class ‘W18’, ‘W16’, ‘M16’; ‘Course B‘ -> ‘W14’, ‘M14’, ‘Open Short’.

If you have two Classes (e.g. ‘Women Elite’ and ‘Women 20’) and both have the same Course, it is a common mistake to name the Course ‘WE, W20‘ and not to create any Classes. You will get troubles with your timing software this way.
Instead you can still name the Course ‘WE, W20‘ (or simple name it ‘A‘), but you need to create two Classes (‘WE‘ and ‘W20‘) and allocate the same Course to both of them.

Create a new Course (Wiki)

Create a new Class (Wiki)

On your map, you can either display the Course title, the Course name or the Class name(s). Use symbol 721 Course title, edit the symbol and choose an item from the dropdown list.

Insights into a camp of the Swiss Orienteering Team

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In the beginning of March, the Swiss National Team was training in Portugal for 9 days to prepare the new season. OCAD is a long-time partner of the Swiss Orienteering Team and was of course widely used to set courses and prepare maps before the camp: 8 different course setters prepared 19 trainings with a total of over 400 controls.

To guarantee highest quality of the trainings, lot of work had to be done behind the scene. An internal document lists the key points:
– Always check if the scale is correct.
– Cut the control circles and connection lines where needed.
– Check the control description.
– Are the North lines on the map?
– On the map with all controls, the control numbers should not cover the control location.

Furthermore, the course setters always use the same course setting template. For every scale, there’s a template, which contains additional symbols, like frames for printing, text symbols or a special North Arrow. This results in a uniform appearance and underlines the common spirit. Also, it guarantees the same color settings for all trainings.

All final courses were exported as GIF’s and double-checked. When everything was in order, PDF’s for printing were created. The printed maps were controlled once again. The result of this effort: Perfect trainings!

Facts and figures: 36 Athletes, 9 Staff, 1100 printed maps (+250 maps from competitions), more than 15h of total work alone for the relay training (setting the course, putting out 50 controls and SI-units and collecting the afterwards).

Links:
– Compose Course tool for fast and easy Course Setting
– O-training with OCAD
– Facebook page of the Swiss Orienteering Team

OCAD 2018 becomes OCAD 2019

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OCAD 2019 is just a new name to underline that you are using a software that is constantly evolving and which contains new features and standards. It’s not a new version. If you are on a subscription model, you will automatically receive OCAD 2019 with the latest Service Update and do not need to purchase any new licenses.

For technical reasons, OCAD installation folders, etc., will continue to be marked as OCAD 2018. However, the general strategy is to omit the year in the name of each OCAD edition in the future.