Hi folks,
Sorry about the confusion with my previous post. Eric Vesting had
sent me a list of problems with the display of accented/umlauted
characters in the recently posted version. (For example, switch to
German and move your cursor over the toolbar, and the tooltips shown
on the title bar have some corrupted characters.) Problem here is one
that has caused much grief over the years: DOS and Windows use
different character sets when it comes to accented European letters.
I fixed all this and posted an update, but it wasn't enough of
one to merit changing the Web page to reflect it. If you are running
Guide in English, Japanese, Chinese, or Russian, or don't mind
an occasional corrupted letter, you can ignore it completely. (The
last three languages use different encoding schemes that are not
affected by these oddities... well, if they are, please let me know;
on my US version of Windows, I can test European languages only.)
About the "red stars" mode: the only real way around this, at
least right now, is to switch back from "red stars" to "normal
colors" (or "chart mode") before leaving the program.
Philippe, about searching for conjunctions of Mercury and
Venus: I'm surprised this _ever_ worked. The program can find
"subsequent" conjunctions for the Moon and any object, and for the
Sun and Mercury or the Sun and Venus (which is helpful in locating
transits.) And it can find the nearest conjunction of arbitrary
objects, such as Mercury and Venus (or, say, asteroid 433 Eros
and Aldebaran). But it's _not_ bright enough to find subsequent
conjunctions of such pairs.
The only real way to find such conjunctions (at least right now)
is to start up animation and run it forward a bit. When you're at
all close to such an event, you can again click on "Find Conjunction",
and it will again detect the nearest such event.
Alan, about the asteroid symbols suddenly becoming larger: I
don't see how Find_Orb would do this; I suspect something unrelated.
I'd check your GUIDE.DAT file and look for a line such as
ASTEROID_SYM=m-32,-32;l32,32;m-32,32;l32,-32;
If it's there, modify the "32" (or whatever size) to a smaller
quantity, and you should be all set. I should perhaps mention that
the full set of symbols resettable in Guide is at
http://www.projectpluto.com/update7.htm#dso_symbols
and the full specs on how you create your own symbols are at
http://www.projectpluto.com/tdf_info.htm#custom_symbols
-- Bill