My contact who has provided this information and who wishes to remain anonymous has emailed further comments as below.

Cheers,

Roger

Hiya Roger

This simple problem they've been having is a guide one, so I'll provide a chance for an easy access Gaia2.bmp, they just need to download it from here :-

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?del_id=95750481319595596775

no need to register, ad blockers can be kept on and not even any need to have cookies accepted.  And no nags for "premium" services needing online payment.

When downloaded it's just copied into the Guide directory.

Anyone who still has mspaint can edit any guide toolbar bmp file, but as I'm running a fairly old version of guide 9 (renamed to guide 8 as I'm still technically a guide 8 user) just for the bug fixes twixt 8 and 9 I still have bmp toolbar buttons.

Bill improved some things over time to make it easier for folk having trouble with stuff but it took away the ease of adapting guide to handle user added data to some extent.

He also tends to use his own compression techniques for files.

However, he usually provides code or software to get around this, and a quick googling reveals this file :-

https://www.projectpluto.com/unlump.com

which claims it will expand your lumps and pull out the bumps.

I'd suggest folk copy .lmp files to an empty space first else they may fill their guide directory with tons of new bmp files, and if they then delete all bmp files they may be killing something that was already there.

One mistake I made in my first tdf note is that I haven't adapted the tdf to search for zero values and not display null data, that was the full tdf for the gaia2 data I'm slowly downloading as a user defined subset via tap vizier (probably going to be around 80+ gig when finished), the vizier small download version just doesn't display blank columns as a Guide default thing.

As for the 9999 thing, vizier subset downloads sometimes can add a preceding running number to downloaded lines for no good reason nowadays, so at 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 etc all columns shift to the right one character.  This will eventually break the tdf.  That is it's not necessarily that things are not being displayed, it's that things are being displayed somewhere else as the ra and dec haven't been read properly by the tdf.  I set things up so it would be okay up to 999 lines, after that it might be fixable for position but data may be garbled in more info, or Gmag lost and if Gmag is lost nothing will be plotted, as there's no mag value available for Guide to know what size dot to plot  If RP mag is missing it can't make a coloured dot, deleting the tdf line starting with phot may fix this latter.

Or just stick to small fields and build up areas piece by piece, as the running number restarts at 1 every download so you can have thousands of lines without ever exceeding 999 lines of download.

Cheers