The kastrolog 5.4-1.1 specific

options page


This page describes the various features and options provided by kastrolog 5.4-1.1
 
 

Click here to get a list of the kastrolog specific flags.

Timezone feature.

One of 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 substracting 1 hour twice a year and even more. This increment is not constant along the history and throughout the world.
Fortunately, many of the UNIX or UNIX-like OS propose a system of data files 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.

BE CAREFUL !  Selecting a zoneinfo file does not mean that the latitude and longitude of the birthplace will be updated.  It is still up to you to give the correct latitude and longitude values. Besides, the daylight feature just gives you a hint of what should be the local hour at this period of time. In some cases, especially during the wars, the question of the daylight offset is rather difficult to ensure :-(

Let's regard 2 casual examples:
 

  • June 17, 1990 12:20 in New-York. New-York is at 74:09W, 40:45N. The city of New-York is geographically situated on the eastern region of the usa. Select US/Eastern, and you will see the Timezone field automatically set to -5:00.

    •  
  • April 10, 1982 18:45 in Barcelona. Barcelona is at 2:11E  41:23N. This city being in Spain, we have to select Europe/Madrid as zone info file. Time zone:  +1:00


    • It also exists a new flag, -zf <filename>, where <filename> is the file name of the wanted zone info file. This flag is saved within the chart info file (produced by the -o command), and can be read with the -i command.

    A new feature has been introduced with the version 5.4 pre3. Kastrolog now accepts a default zoneinfo file with the flag : -Yf <filename>, where <filename> is the name of a zoneinfo file.
    Example : -Yf Asia/Tokyo

      Two possibilities exist :
      Either the default zoneinfo only affect the Now chart when it is computed, or thank to the -YB flags, this default file is used for the zoneless charts too (i.e. without declared zoneinfo file).
      You can also select this option in the Obscure Settings dialog box.

      Both -Yf and YB flags are saved in the astrolog.dat file.
     If, on the Chart Info panel, you click on the button  H:M:S button, the daylight value and the time zone offset are recomputed from the zoneinfo file.

    Multi-Windows.

    Kastrolog can display several independant windows containing any kind of chart. See the menu "File/New window".
      The current window is killed with the "File/Close" menu, and the whole application and all its windows with "File/Quit".

    Named macro-commands.

    The flag -M1 has been added, which works  like -M0, although it also modifies the Run macro menu with the corresponding name.
      Syntax : -M1 <number> <macro> <name>, where number is between 1..48, <macro> is your macro string and <name>, the given name
      Example : -M1 4 "i JohnDoe.kst" "John Doe"

      The macros created with -M0 or -M1 are automatically saved in your astrolog.dat file.
     

    Kst file extension.

    All the kastrolog data files are now acknowledged by the .kstextension. The corresponding "application/kst" MIME type has been created, with a icon associated to it. The Drag and Drop feature is also supported for this type of file. Just grab from kfm a .kst file icon onto a kastrolog window and the corresponding chart will be displayed.
     

    File paths.

    All the placlac and help files are stored in $KDEDIR/apps/share/kastrolog. However, if it doesn't exist yet, the directory ~/.kde/share/apps/kastrolog is created and the standard astrolog.dat file is copied there. Normally, you should put all your data files into this same directory, so that several users can have their own astrolog.dat and personal data files. You can also create a link to this directory on your desktop with :
      ln -s ~/.kde/share/apps/kastrolog ~/kastrolog
     


     

    Printing centering.

    When kastrolog prints out a chart, a 2cm margin has been taken into account all around. However, extra margins can be added by your printing utility (actually ghostscript), which decentres the printed chart. The flag -Ym provides a way to inform kastrolog of the possible values of those margins, for both portrait and landscape printing.
     Syntax: -Ym <portx> <porty> <landx> <landy>, where <portx> and <porty> are the horizontal and vertical offsets added to the portrait printing, and <landx> <landy>, the equivalent for the landscape printing.
    These values are positive and expressed in cm. Thus, if you want to substract something, you must provide a negative value.
      Example: -Ym  -0.3  0  -1.0  0
     The -Ym flag plus its arguments are saved into the astrolog.dat file.
     

    Arbitrary time increment.

    The original astrolog can display the previous or next minute chart when the '+' or '-' keys are pressed. Kastrolog can now display futur and past charts using the animation parameters. Just select the jump unit menu (hour, day, year, etc..) and the jumps number (1 to 9), then press '+' or '-' to get the corresponding chart.
     

    Comment field.

    A comment field has been added to the chart info dialog box. Feel free to write down here some ideas or info, or even a whole interpretation. You can extent rightward the info dialog box size, and the comment field size will be resized accordingly. Accented characters accepted.
     Some editing key combinations are supported, among them :
        For more information, see the QT toolkit documentation -> QMultiLineEdit::keyPressEvent

    H:M:S Longitude format.

    On the cities lists with geographical coordinates, the longitudes are often expressed in Hour, Minute, Second instead of degree, minute. If you click on the "Long.HMS" radio button on the Chart Info panel, the longitude value is redisplayed in H:M:S format. You can obviously also enter the longitude in this format.
    Examples of longitude format: Don't forget to insert an 'e' or 'w' to indicate the east or west longitude direction.
     

     Kas2latex.

    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.
     Don't forget to install 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.

    Syntax: kas2latex <Year of beginning> < Number of years>

    Example: kas2latex 1900 200

    In order to print pages in a4 format instead of legal format, you should issue the following command:

    dvips -x 820 -t a4 -O 1cm,0cm -o ephem.ps ephem.dvi

    The ephem.ps file is created and can be previewed with kghostview, or directely printed with lpr.
    You can also provide the -A or -B flags to the dvips command to print odd, respectively even pages.
     

    Kastrolog 5.4 specific flags: