  kastrolog 5.4 beta 3
(C)opyright by Christophe Gros, Walter D. Pullen, James Neely, Brian D. Willoughby
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.
For more information about the original astrolog program, see
http://www.magitech.com/~cruiser1/astrolog.htm

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 :-)

* 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.

* 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
  alterated by adding or substrating 1 hour or even a few minutes 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.

* 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.


  
  This software is still in beta test. So don't expect an immediate
  perfection. A few bugs remain, but this program seems to be ready
  for use, even for a non-hacker user. See the BUGS file for more
  information.

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

          2.2.2000            Christophe Gros   Llyra@altavista.com





