Hi folks,

Yes, there was a problem in getting the bitmaps of Mercury:
the FTP transfer software I used bit me in an unexpected manner.
It's fixed now.

About double stars: you can use either the WDS as provided on
the Guide CD, or the updated WDS, or (my current preference) the
CCDM (Catalogue of Components of Double and Multiple Stars). This
last has the advantage of showing you the positions of individual
components, _accurately_ (the WDS rounds off positions to the nearest
arcminute, so the WDS symbol often doesn't match up with anything
in any obvious way.) Its only real downside is that it lists maybe
a third as many stars as WDS... but the omitted stars are mostly the
fainter, less significant two-thirds.

Use of the updated WDS is discussed at

http://www.projectpluto.com/extras.htm#WDS

Use of CCDM is discussed at

http://www.projectpluto.com/extras.htm#ccdm

Andrea, about 'gloss' and 'manual': those are directories, not
files. They contain HTML versions of the Guide glossary and user manual,
respectively, automatically generated from original files. The glossary
can be accessed at

http://www.projectpluto.com/gloss/help_8.htm#Glossary

The user manual is available at

http://www.projectpluto.com/manual/page01.htm

At the time, I was thinking of replacing Guide's built-in help
system with an HTML-based one. (Windows Help is definitely out;
you can't modify it dynamically, whereas Guide creates new 'help'
information every time you ask for 'more info' or generate a list of
events or data.) Doing so has some real appeal, not least of which
is that I would only have to generate help data, not display it; the
browser would do that for me. And in assorted places in Guide, it'd
be nice if you could bring up pages from the manual.

The downside is that I'd have to give up many of the nifty tricks
Guide currently can do, such as "click on a red-highlighted piece of
text and go to that object and/or date." I know this is extremely
non-Windows-like behavior, but it's also a wonderful feature, and
it would be tough to abandon it.

I expect to put both the HTML manual and glossary (in all languages)
on the Guide 8 disks. That way, if I come up with a wonderful solution,
I can modify the software and have the data already in place.

-- Bill