I've been thinking about this, since this morning's conference call.
I believe that Codes would be the best way for Adam to simulate Carlson. My thought is this. Build a code in J-Field for each Carlson field to finish action code.
Here I've made a Code, called ea. I've set up two attributes for this code: Line Number and Action. Line Number will be attached to the Code to produce the Carlson field-to-finish action code ea1 (in this example). During collection, you can change this attribute to 2, 3, 4, etc. which will produce ea2, ea3, ea4. This will require a slight change to our exporting which I'll describe in more detail in a moment. The action will also export. In this example I've set up action code "PC" which will begin a curve in Carlson field-to-finish. This Action could be any action you might desire (PT, CLO, JPN, JOG, etc.) Once you enter the action item in the attribute, the attribute library stores this item until you delete it from the library. So you don't have to type any of them more than once. Once you type it in, you can just recall it from the attribute selection screen. This should prove to be very fast. Pick the code from your code list, pick the line number from the Line Number attribute list, pick an action from the Action attribute list. If you don't want an Action, select <EMPTY> from the Action attribute list.
View attachment 3429
On the Collect Action screen, setup white boxes for Code (see box "ea") and Attributes (see box 1, PC). Also setup white box for description. In this case the description can be used for text entry to further describe the point being collected (if necessary). Notice I have prefaced the Description with a "/". The default nature of this character prevents text to the right from being processed in Field to Finish.
View attachment 3430
At Export, I would have my .txt set up to export as follows:
View attachment 3431
The export will need one addition, a Separator 3. A point exported with the above Code (ea) and Attributes (1, PC) would export like this:
L042,5000.0000000000,5000.0000000000,100.0000000000,ea 1 PC /Desc
This almost produces the desired result, except that we don't want the space between "ea" and "1". We do need the comma delimiter, and we do need the space delimiter, but we need a third delimiter, None, between the Code and Attribute 1, which in my example is the line number, which would produce "ea1". This would result in an export of:
L042,5000.0000000000,5000.0000000000,100.0000000000,ea1 PC /Desc
I still maintain that the J-Field line work using Tags and Codes is more efficient than Carlson's Field to Finish, but I understand the desire to maintain consistency across platforms. It's possible that you could still use J-Field's line work with Tags and Codes and still use this scheme to work with Carlson. Adam, what do you think?