TransLT

TransLT is a comprehensive application suite that implements four separate tools for working with reference coordinates systems. They are capable of calculating parameters and transforming coordinates, drawing polygons in Google Earth, and converting coordinate files to other formats.

The setup operation may take a while but it doesn't include customization preferences. It's not possible to exclude any of the four components from installation. These utilities are wrapped in a user-friendly interface with a clear-cut structure that enables you to seamlessly figure out the available actions and settings.

You can work with two pages for manipulating coordinates. This data can be manually typed or loaded from external files, edited, and exported (Microsoft Word or Excel). It's possible to use a basic text search function, change the renumbering modes, swap the columns with coordinates, and ask the tool to calculate geocentric Cartesian coordinates using ellipsoidal elevations.

In the following stage you can calculate parameters for transformations on height (1D), in plane (2D) or in space (3D). All you have to do is pick the transformation mode (e.g. 3D plane rotation, translate to elevation, 2D Helmert conformal transformation), load common points, or ask the program to get the best combination possible out of any number of points you specify. These points may be viewed in a 2D or 3D graphical representation.

TransLT lets you load entities from external files, in order to prepare them for Google Draw. You can select the entity type and edit the number, description, area, perimeter, color, opacity and line width. Plus, you can choose the elements to add between number, description, area, perimeter, address, destination, usage and URL link. The same rules apply when drawing polygons in Google Earth.

The conversion tool included in TransLT is very simple to work with. It lets you open files with various extensions (.txt, .coo, .xyz, .geo, .csv), pick the transformation model, apply reverse transformation if necessary, and establish the associated file extension for the output coordinates.

As far as TransLT options are concerned, you can select the favorite coordinate reference systems and coordinate operations, edit ellipsoids, choose the order of geographic coordinates in tables and files, change the CSV delimiter, clean empty rows of tables with the results of transformations, fix values at the decimal number of coordinates when saving them to file, pick the encoding mode, view reports in plain text, RTF or HTML format, configure page setup, customize the text and line colors and opacity for drawings made in Google Earth, and so on.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the utility didn't hang, crash or display error messages. Its impact on computer performance was minimal, since it needed low CPU and memory to function normally.

TransLT proves to be a feature-rich and rather intuitive application suite for handling coordinates, and it should meet the requirements of most users.