====================
 Total Open Station
====================

Total Open Station (TOPS for friends) is a free software program for
downloading and processing data from total station devices, written in
the Python programming language.

This is a task which is usually done by proprietary, dedicated and
Windows™-only software, but TOPS is different by nature, because:

- it is *free/libre open source software*;
- it works on *any* operating system where Python is available;
- it is designed to support as many devices and formats as possible, all
  within the same program, opposed to having one program per device.

Every model has its own quirks, but TOPS uses a modular structure and
keeps the downloading of data logically separated from its processing,
thus enabling exporting data to a variety of output formats, even at a
later moment. Archiving of raw data is made easy by using plain text
files.

The application icons are copyright by Lapo Calamandrei 2008, under the
same license as Total Open Station.

Documentation
=============

Documentation is available at in the ``docs`` subdirectory of this
package and online at http://totalopenstation.readthedocs.org/ with
an user guide, details on the application structure, supported models
and other interesting stuff.
