        kastrolog 5.4-1.1
(C)opyright by Christophe Gros, Walter D. Pullen, James Neely, Brian D. Willoughby
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README file.


Kastrolog is a KDE port of the famous Walter Pullen's astrolog software.
Astrolog is a powerful, even professional software for computing and displaying
astrology charts. It includes many useful features such as transits and
progressions calculations, Astrograph aspects, midpoints grids ans many others.
kastrolog can be found at http://devel-home.kde.org/~kastrolog/
For more information about the original astrolog program, see
http://www.astrolog.org

Kastrolog has been developped for the Linux/KDE operating system and graphical
environment. Most of the original features have been implemented, (such as a
true menu bar) except a few that I consider rather useless for the moment.
In addition to those features, kastrolog includes the following enhancements:

* 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 :-)

* A better printing. Unlike the original astrolog, kastrolog doesn't dump a
  raw screen copy onto the printing queue, but rather uses the qt internal
  postscript generation to produce high quality output.

* 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 now uses the scalable
  courier font instead of the native vectorial font.

* Multi-Windows feature. 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.

* 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 (i.e. without declared zoneinfo file).
  You can 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 showing the
  astrolog icon, the daylight value is recomputed from the zoneinfo
  file.

* 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.

* kst files. Now, each kastrolog data file has its 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.

* The -M1 command. This command is 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.

* 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 increments. 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. 
  
* New !!! 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 :

  - Ctrl-C      Copy the hilighted text into the clipboard
  - Ctrl-X      Cut the hilighted text into the clipboard
  - Ctrl-V      Yank the copied or cut text.
  - Home        Move the cursor to the beginning of the line
  - End         Move the cursor to the end of the line
  
  For more information, see the QT toolkit documentation -> QMultiLineEdit::keyPressEvent
  
* 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.
   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.  

  In order to install this software, see the INSTALL file in the same
  directory.

          1.9.2000            Christophe Gros   Llyra@altavista.com
















