StarPlot - A 3-dimensional star chart viewer

StarPlot - Copyright (C) 2000-2008 Kevin B. McCarty <starplot@starplot.org>
Web page: http://starplot.org/

1. DESCRIPTION

StarPlot is a GTK+ based program, written in C++, which can be used
interactively to view three-dimensional perspective charts of stars.  It is
licensed under the GNU General Public License.  If you find StarPlot useful,
or want to submit a bug report, feature request or patch, please drop me an
email!

2. CONTENTS

This directory should include the following subdirectories:

	src		Source code.
	doc		StarPlot documentation.
	intl		GNU libintl.
	lib		Routines to replace any missing library functions.
	m4		GNU m4 Autoconf functions.
	po		Translations.

The following files (not a complete list) may also be of interest:

	AUTHORS		List of authors (currently only one).
	COPYING		The GNU GPL, version 2.
	ChangeLog	History of StarPlot.
	INSTALL		Installation instructions for StarPlot.
	INSTALL.generic	Generic instructions for configure.
	README		This file.
	TODO		Planned future work on the program.
	configure	Script to configure compile-time options.

3. INSTALLATION

Please see the file INSTALL in this directory.  The file INSTALL.generic
provides generic instructions for source trees with configure scripts.  The
executive summary: "./configure && make && sudo make install".  HTML
documentation will be installed by default under the directory
/usr/local/share/doc/starplot/html.

4. DATA FILES

StarPlot comes with only two small example data files.  This (a) makes it
easier to download, and (b) removes the problem of having data files with
GPL-incompatible licenses within the program source tree.  Other data files can
be downloaded and installed from the StarPlot web page.  To do so, see the
"starpkg" man page.  The executive summary: being that you have downloaded the
file datafile.tar.gz from the StarPlot web page, run "starpkg datafile.tar.gz"
as root.  This will also work if you do not have root permissions, but the
resulting .stars file will be saved to your current directory.

Please read the copyright information in the COPYING and README files of those
data sets - note that many of them can be freely distributed only if *not*
modified.  That is, you can pass around an unmodified copy of datafile.tar.gz,
but not a copy of datafile.stars.

To create your own StarPlot data files from files of star data (available, for
instance, from http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr ), you will want to read the man page
or HTML documentation for the "starconvert" program.  To create StarPlot data
files from scratch, see the HTML documentation for the data file format.

5. SPECIAL NOTE

I would like to thank my brother Jason for working with me on programming
StarPlot with a GUI written in C++, back when we were still playing with it
on Windows 95/NT.  This was a vast improvement over the original QBASIC
version I wrote in high school.  If anyone wants to see the QBASIC version,
I still have the file ;)

6. COPYRIGHT

StarPlot is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

Comments are welcome.

-- Kevin B. McCarty <starplot@starplot.org>