Hi folks,

I just compared the documentation for .UOV files that Hartwig
posted to the version on the Guide CD... they are _almost_ the same,
but I made a few changes over the years; you'd do best to look at
the version on the CD. As Masaki Kouda noted, it's in the file
\COMPRESS\OVL_FMT.DOC. (The COMPRESS format contains most of the
documentations for file formats.)

The changes involve things such as the ability to automatically
load the .UOV file (you don't have to edit OVERLAYS.NAM, as the
original documentation required) and to include stars in the overlay.
(That last function is basically unused now; user-added datasets
are a much better way to display extra stars in Guide.)

About editing overlays using the functions built into Guide: it's
not surprising that this would cause some confusion, because I revised
the editing system shortly after Guide 7 came out. So it's documented
on the Web site, but not in the first batch of Guide 7 user manuals.
Documentation is available at:

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7c.htm#overlay_tools
http://www.projectpluto.com/manual/page34.htm

Regarding observing logs: it's something I get asked about from
time to time. I've avoided it for a while, but I suspect I'll have
to sit down with a few of them and think about designing such functions
into Guide. At a minimal level, I can make use of the existing "notes"
capability, working in a way that these can be edited from within
Guide (probably by yanking them out into a separate file and editing
them with, say, Notepad.) None of this is apt to happen, though,
until Guide 8 is shipped... and such functions _can_ be added to the
software; they don't require fresh batches of CD-ROMs.

-- Bill