Another long one...
GETTING OUT OF THE WRONG LANGUAGE
Ove Christensen is not alone in this problem... I've heard a few
times from people who got into an unfamiliar language and wound up doing
something drastic, such as re-installing. Part of the problem is that
most of the languages have hotkeys. For example, '~' switches to and
from German; '!' French; '`' Dutch (which is probably what Ove hit);
and so forth.
I've just added the following to the 'FAQ for current Guide users',
and you'll see it on the site the next time I post an update:
------ Clip from new FAQ text begins ------
Q: I accidentally put Guide into a language I don't understand. How
can I get it back to English?
A: Hit the '!' key twice.
The '!' key causes Guide to switch to French. If you are already in
French, it will switch to English. (This lets French-speakers use it as
a French-English toggle.)
------ Clip from new FAQ text ends ------
COOL CARBON STARS DATASET:
Also, I've just posted a new user-added dataset file I received from
John Greaves. This one allows you to display the 'Cool Galactic Carbon
Star' (CGCS) catalog. These are _very_ red stars. (The 'cool' indicates
temperature, rather than the meaning it usually seems to have on the Web
<grin>.) For details, see:
http://www.projectpluto.com/extras.htm#cgcs
STORING LOCATIONS AS .MAR FILES:
As Hartwig points out, you can store locations as .MAR files. In
fact, you can even then edit the .MAR file and remove lines not related
to position. For example, in testing some items reported by a Guide
user in Australia, I created the following .MAR file:
999 name Loomberah lat/lon
11 lat/lon 151.0461 -31.3347 0
28 altitude 890.00
...which simply sets latitude = S 31.3347, longitude = 151.0461,
topocentric, altitude = 890 meters. Those curious about the inner
workings of .MAR files will want to look at this incomplete, but
pretty good, reference:
http://www.projectpluto.com/mar_fmt.doc
Ideally, I'd prefer to have a way to label sites and store them...
some of the need for this went away with the 'enter location name' button
in the Location dialog, but not _all_ the need.
TRANSPARENT HORIZON
Thomas Roehr pointed out that the user-added horizon isn't transparent.
The main reason I did that was that I wanted to make sure you could see
what was about to rise, or had just set. Not everyone shares my preference
for a transparent horizon, though, and I may add an 'opaque horizon' option.
LABELS ON OBJECT TRAILS
I'd long balked at doing this, because of problems with getting it to
not look like a real mess. But I now suspect that, if the user could say
something such as 'add label at every 5th tick mark on the trail'; and
could then look at the result and delete cosmetically objectionable labels;
the result might be pretty useful. So it may happen.
VARIABLE STARS:
Jari mentioned that there's an option to have certain classes of variable
stars shown at minimum instead of maximum (and, incidentally, to have
variables of different classes shown in different colors). This is
documented in a file tucked away on the CD-ROM:
\compress\var_type.doc
-- Bill