Hi folks,

Claude mentioned adding images in the .NOT files... not a bad idea,
although (as he mentioned) this doesn't work yet. In theory, I may
rig up Guide to pass such requests to a browser (the idea being that,
when you click on a link with a file extension such as .html, .gif,
etc., your browser would come up with that link loaded).

Ideally, Guide's help system should have been HTML-based from the
beginning. (I had to abandon any idea of a Windows-based help system;
you can't dynamically alter such a help system, the way Guide does
routinely when you click for "more info" on an object or generate a
table of events.) It would actually have saved me a bit of work, since
I would have written only the code required to create .HTML files, not
the code to display them. But at this point, such a revision would be
a Big Problem.

Oliver mentioned display of a solar bitmap... this is on my long-term
"to do" list. The major difficulty is that when Guide does its bitmap
renditions of planets, it uses a map in cylindrical coordinates. I've
not tackled the problems involved in registering and unwrapping a solar
image yet.

A couple of new items on the Web site: Eduardo Vila-Echague has
provided a Guide-displayable version of the Almagest star catalog.
Details are at

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

I'd suggest looking at this even if you aren't especially interested
in displaying the Almagest, because Eduardo has also provided a really
good discussion of the history of this catalog. It gives you some idea
of the state of the art in astronomy two millennia ago.

Also: the index page has lagged a bit over the last year or so (!),
with many interesting things added to the site that never got an index
entry. This is mostly fixed now; I went through and added a few dozen
entries to that page. You may find it's worth a scan-through.

-- Bill