In the last OCAD Update, small but useful changes were added to the Course Setting Module. Show Preview The shortcut CTRL+R has been added to show / hide the Preview mode. (1) Highlight unused control in course object list Controls that are not used in any courses will be highlighted with red color in the course object list. (2) Cut out control circles and connection lines Select a control circle or course line and use the shortcut CTRL+G to cut a gap. To create a gap, click once on the control circle or course line. Also, you can click and drag the mouse from the beginning to the the end of ..read more

Thanks to the Background Favorites option, you can quickly and easily switch between different background maps when drawing. In the Manage Background Maps dialog, you can make a background map visible in the background favorites by turning on the eye icon in the corresponding cell. In this example, four different background maps are loaded: An areal image, a slope gradient map, a hill shading map and a vegetation height map. The last two are marked as background favorites. As you know, the topmost visible background map is displayed in OCAD. In this example, the aerial image is therefore disp ..read more

OCAD has updated its symbol sets for orienteering and sprint orienteering after a revision by the IOF. The new symbol sets are valid from 1st February 2024 and mandatory for IOF events from 1st January 2025. Update Orienteering Symbol Set due to ISOM 2017-2 Revision 6 The most important changes: New symbol added for Retained earth wall | New symbol added for Dangerous pit | New symbol added Continuing point after map exchange | Renumbering of certain symbols | Certain symbols for minimum sizes removed Update Sprint Orienteering Symbol Set due to ISSprOM 2019-2 Revision 6 The most important ..read more

OCAD has been sponsoring prizes for the Swiss Orienteering course setting competition for many years. The aim of the competition is to set good and level courses for certain categories and to comply with the required framework conditions. The course set by former orienteering world champion Thomas Bührer impressed the jury the most. Click here for the analysis (German language) and the winning courses ..read more

We have added some new features to the OCAD Sketch App. To update the app, go to Google Play Store (Android) or Apple App Store (iOS), search for OCAD Sketch and update the app. See here a short video of what has changed. – Sketch colors can now be filtered and sorted. – Zoom buttons can be hidden – see project settings. – The Eraser can be resized – see project settings. – The Sketch layer can be hidden or just dimmed – see layers menu. – All background layers can be shown or hidden all at once – see layers menu. – Bug fixes and performance improvements ..read more

We hope you all had a good start to the new year and wish you all the best for 2024. In this blog post, we take a look at what has been added to OCAD over the last year in terms of functionality and learning aids. OCAD Route Analyzer 2.0 The Route Analyzer 2.0 now also takes into account the relief and the runnability. With it, the fastest routes can be calculated in urban as well as in classic forest terrain. Optimized DEM for Course Setting Available To ensures that the climbing and slope gradient are included in the route calculation of Route Analyzer 2.0, an optimized elevation model can ..read more

The OCAD Basics exercise teaches both basic and advanced drawing and editing functions in an interactive way. Many tips and tricks for working efficiently with OCAD are also presented. The exercise file is therefore not only suitable for beginners, but also for experienced users who want to refresh their OCAD knowledge. It can be found in the OCAD program under Menu File > Open Sample Maps in English, Swedish or German (OCAD Basics_EN.ocd, OCAD Basics_SE.ocd or OCAD Basics_DE.ocd). If the files are not visible, please download the latest OCAD Update. More OCAD Tutorials can be found here ..read more

The specifications for the control descriptions have been slightly adapted by the International Orienteering Federation IOF and published as ISCD 2024. The new symbol sets are valid from 1 January 2024 and are already available in OCAD (Menu File > New > Course Setting project for orienteering). The most important changes: Color of the control description on map now black by default (optionally still purple, see the Course Setting Options). According to IOF, control description sheet on map should be printed in black. New symbols for map filp and railway are shown.You can change the co ..read more

In this article we present different ways of drawing stairs in OCAD and what to look out for. If stairs are drawn too small or too narrow, this greatly impairs legibility and the staircase can easily be mistaken for an impassable object (especially if the print quality of the circles is poor). How is the stairway symbol defined? Steps of a stairway shall be represented in a generalized manner. Contour lines shall be cut out for better legibility, if they touch stairways. This means that when you are drawing stairs you should make sure that… (1) treads are not drawn with too little spacing (m ..read more

This blog post is about how to compare 2 versions of an OCAD file. What are possible ways to find out what has changed at object level between two versions of a file? #01: Select by Date You can select objects by their Creation date or Modification date in the menu Select > Select by date. You will get a list of all objects which have been created or modified during a specified period of time. It’s possible to sort the values in the list by double clicking on the top row. Click on a object in the list to move the view to the corresponding object. You can save this selection, reload it and ..read more