rolandrosenfeld / sunclock Goto Github PK

README for Sunclock version 3.xx
--------------------------------

Sunclock is a sophisticated clock for the X Window system.  It is
based on an earlier version by John Mackin, itself derived from the
Suntools program by John Walker. Many possibilities of the original 
astronomy routines are now exploited.

Sunclock displays a map of the Earth and shows which portion is illuminated
by the sun. It can commute between two states, the "clock window" and
the "map window". The clock window displays a small map of the Earth
and therefore occupies little space on the screen, while the "map window" 
displays a large map and offers more advanced functions: local time
of cities, Sun and Moon position, etc.

A customizable list of cities is loaded by sunclock at start-up (and can 
be modified interactively, as well). Using the information provided for 
these cities, the map window can operate in five different modes:

- "Legal time" mode: legal time of default time zone and GMT time are 
  displayed.
- "Coordinate" mode: by clicking on a city, users get coordinates 
  (latitude, longitude) of that city, legal time and sunrise/sunset.
- "Solar" mode: by clicking on a point of the map (either a city or 
  another point), solar time and day length are shown.
- "Hour Extension" mode: displays solar times from 00:00 to 23:00 in bottom
  strip, according to the Sun position.
- "Distance" mode: shows distances in km and miles between two arbitrary
  locations.

A further functionality is the "Progress" feature, which allows to accelerate 
the evolution of time, so as to observe the evolution of day/night periods 
and seasons.

The sunclock package includes a vector map of the Earth (loosely
derived from the xearth package by Kirk Lauritz Johnson), which is
capable of building Earth maps of arbitrary sizes without losing the
accuracy of details (within certain limits...)

Meridians, Parallels, Equator, Tropics and Arctic circles can also be
drawn. All these actions are performed through mouse clicks 
on the map or on the bottom strip, and/or with keyboard shortcuts. 
There is inline help available by typing 'h' or by clicking on the 
bottom strip -- so that no further explanation should be needed. 
Commuting between the clock and map states is obtained by typing '!' 
or simply <Space>.

By default, the Sun and Moon are also shown on the map (rather, the
positions of Earth where Sun and Moon are at zenith are shown).
Coordinates of meridians, parallels, cities, the names of cities can
be displayed on the map.

If you are using a monochrome display, there is an option 
   -colorlevel <value>
that will enable sunclock to run in monochrome mode (in that case,
use -colorlevel 0).

Under pseudocolor displays (depth <= 8), sunclock allocates private 
colormaps as soon as they are needed; there is also a builtin machanism 
which automatically quantizes true-color Earth maps which would have too 
many distinct colors for Pseudocolor displays. At the moment, sunclock 
can read .jpg, .xpm or .xpm.gz images, and also its own .vmf vector map 
format. Other image formats have to be converted to xpm or jpg before
being loaded - e.g. with the netpbm or with the Imagemagick package.

Sunclock is internationalized and currently supports the following 
localizations:
  de (German), en (English), es (Spanish), fr (French), it (Italian), 
  nl (Dutch), no (Norwegian), pl (Polish), se (Swedish), also
not all translations are up-to-date. Using iso8859-2 encoded fonts
is required for Polish (other currently supported languages work with 
iso8859-1 or iso8859-15). Thus, for Polish, a special setting of the
fonts in Sunclockrc is needed (edit the file by uncommenting the
appropriate font settings).

Sunclock versions 3.xx are released under the GPL.


[email protected]

==============================================================================

Starting from version 3.30 on, the recommended image format is JPEG,
(although you can still use the .xpm or .xpm.gz format as before).
We suggest you to download (actually very nice!) Earth maps from the
xglobe/xplanet home sites
   http://www.radcyberzine.com/xglobe/
   http://www.vterrain.org/Imagery/whole_earth.html
   http://apollo.spaceports.com/~jhasting/planets.html
A bundled package of Earth maps is also provided on
   ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/geosciences/sunclock_jpg_maps.tgz

More information on geographic names, city coordinates, timezones can be 
obtained from
   http://gnpswww.nima.mil/geonames/GNS/

==============================================================================

Please check the WARNING file for more comments, especially on recent
changes which affect sunclock's behaviour. Take also a look to CHANGES
if you want to review all changes which occurred during the development.

==============================================================================

Original README
---------------

X11 version by John Mackin, <[email protected]>, based on a Suntools program
by John Walker, <[email protected]>.

This program is a clock that shows which portion of the Earth's surface is
illuminated by the Sun.  It is designed to be usually iconic, but can be
opened for a larger display with the time updated every second and both the
local timezone and UTC displayed.  The Suntools version had a menu that
allowed you to speed up time, show different dates, etc., but I have
never implemented any of that in the X version; there is some support
for it in the code, however.

The program should have been written using Xt rather than raw Xlib, and I
tried that at first.  I couldn't get the icon window to work, though, so I
abandoned that version.  Hence, the program does _not_ accept most Xt-style
command line options; valid options are given in the manual page.

The program has been tested on a number of different clients (MIPS, Sun,
VAX) and servers (MIPS colour console, Sun MIT mono, NCD-16/19), under X11R3
and R4.  If you find bugs, please report them to me, [email protected].

To build the program, decide whether you want to use imake or not.  If you
don't, link Makefile.dist to Makefile, and edit it, otherwise edit the
Imakefile and use xmkmf.  The program uses two fonts, one for the icon
display and one for the large window display.  The names of these fonts
are compiled in.  The font names comes from -DBIGFONT and -DSMALLFONT
in the Makefile.  If you are not using imake, you will need to supply
a -DSYSV option if you are System V.  You should supply -DNEW_CTIME if
you are using the table-driven ctime and a "struct tm" contains
a tm_zone field.  If neither of the ways of getting the local timezone
name works on your system, please let me know.

The original Suntools program, in case you want it, was posted as Volume 1,
Issue 79 of comp.sources.sun.

This program is public domain and may be freely copied as long as the
notices at the top of sunclock.c remain intact.