Kastrolog

Description

Kastrolog is a KDE port of Astrolog, Walter D. Pullen's famous, powerful and free astrology software. It can, for a given time and place, compute the planets and stars positions, display the corresponding astrological chart and print it. Kastrolog can also compute the transits and progressions relatively to the natal chart, compare two charts or more, make an astro-synastry chart, display a chart mid-points, sort the aspects by influence, animate a chart, etc...

In addition to the classical Astrolog features described above, kastrolog includes the following improvements :

• A faster and better display. Now, the computing and the display are separated. Since the image redraw no longer involves the whole computing process, the display runs really faster :-)
• Kastrolog is shipped with an enhanced version of the Astro-SemiBold font. This font includes new glyphs for the asteroids, chiron, vertex, east point, descendant and IC. Moreover, the graphical display uses now the scalable courier font instead of the native vector font.
• Multi-Windows feature. Kastrolog can display several independent windows containing any kind of chart.
• Timezone feature. One of the most difficult problems in astrology computing is the determination of the daylight setting and possibly the timezone offset. For political and economical reasons, the "standard" time of a country can be altered by adding or subtracting 1 hour twice a year and even more. This change is not constant along the history and throughout the world. Fortunately, many of the UNIX or UNIX-like OSes propose a system of data files for time determination simply named zoneinfo. These files are often located in the /usr/share/zoneinfo or /usr/local/share/zoneinfo directories. Each zoneinfo file has the name of a major city and is stored in a subdirectory whose the name is the one of the country, region or continent it belongs to. In order to benefit from this feature, select the "Info/Set Chart Info" menu. You will see a "ZoneInfo file" button. If you click on it, a file selector dialog box will appear, which allows you to choose the closest region and city within the corresponding region of your birthplace. Then, the daylight button and TimeZone field will be updated accordingly.
• kst files. Now, the kastrolog data files have their own extention, named .kst with a mime type and an icon associated to it. The Drag and Drop feature is also supported for this type of file. Moreover, the kst files accept accented characters for foreign names.
• Multilingual application. Kastrolog is basically in English, but it has been designed for easy translation. For the moment, only the English and French versions are available. If you need other versions, (German, Spanish, etc...) you have to write the corresponding .po files. Contact me in case of trouble.
• The kas2latex utility. Kas2latex is a perl script which produces a .dvi output file containing a pretty ephemeris for the given years, 4 months a page in legal paper size, for the 10 planets + north node. This ephemeris has been designed to resemble the classical book "The concise planetary ephemeris, (Hieratic Publishing Co)". Simply run kas2latex and provide the year of beginning, plus the number of years. You can then preview the produced ephem.dvi with kdvi or xdvi, and print it out with dvips or dvilj4.

Requirements

Kastrolog has been specifically developed for KDE. KDE is a powerful, popular and free desktop for UNIX like operating systems, like Linux or FreeBSD. It has only been tested on Linux.

The kas2latex utility requires a Perl 5.005 and a Tex package containing Latex and the wasy font, such as the Tetex package. Kas2latex only works in English and for the legal paper size.

Authors

Status

Kastrolog is under GPL licence for the KDE port part. (C++ sources, includes, extra doc, etc ...) The original astrolog software is under free licence as in the readme.540 file.

• Download kastrolog 5.4-1.1 C source code [tar.gz 691 Kb]
• Download kastrolog 5.4-1.1 for Red Hat Linux 6.x [RPM 663 Kb]
• Download kastrolog 5.4-1.1 for other PC Linux distributions [tar.gz 662 Kb]