Hi Ed,

You're most of the way there...

The thing to do is this. Don't modify the .tdf file at all. Run the
'add_loc' program. You need to do this because the actual data file,
'wdsweb_summ.txt', has some oddities in the way in which coordinates are
stored; I wrote 'add_loc' to put the coordinates in a more consistent
form, understandable to Guide. It also sorts the WDS file in order of
right ascension. Guide can draw a sorted file _much_ faster than an
unsorted one. (Most data files are already sorted, but WDS is an oddball
in many ways.)

After running 'add_loc', you should have a file called 'wds_out.txt'.
It is this file, with coordinates nicely formatted and sorted, and all
lines of equal length, that Guide will display. You should be able to
just fire Guide up and see the data. There is a bit more about all this at

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

Since you asked about the grisly innards, though... the reason the
.tdf looks like this:

> file !:wds\wds_crun.dat
> file wds_out.txt
> title wds(current)

...is because the Guide 9.0 DVDs have a copy of WDS on them, in a
compressed ("crunched") format. The idea is that Guide, of flavor 8.0
or 9.0, will look first for wds_out.txt, on the theory that it's apt
to be more up-to-date than some version from a Guide disk. If it's
unable to find such an update, then it looks for the 'wds_crun.dat'
file from the CD or DVD.

-- Bill