                                    Panorama
                                    ========


Introduction
============

Panorama, is a database of around 180,000 points outlining the continents,
lakes, rivers, islands, borders and the states making up the USA. In
addition it contains the positions of almost 1000 cities. The Panorama
program, allows this database to be rendered as Draw files that can be
exported to most Archimedes DTP programs etc.


Getting Started
===============

Double click on the !Panorama application icon, after a pause while the
program loads and initialises, a 'world' icon will appear on the icon bar.
Clicking with the mouse menu button over this, displays a small menu which
provides an entry to quit the program, and a dialogue box showing the
version number of the program. Clicking on the icon with the select button
will open the main Panorama window. Initially, this is blank. Clicking the
menu button over this window, will display the main Panorama menu.


The selections on the main menu are as follows;

Save
----
Moving the pointer to the right of this, will display a standard save box.
Dragging the Draw file icon allows maps to be saved to disc or direct into
other programs. If no map has been drawn, this option will be shaded out.

Draw
----
This tells the program to use the current settings to produce a map. Because
of the large number of points involved this can take a long time. Maps are
drawn in the background, so you can use the desktop to do other things at
the same time. Whilst a map is being drawn, the pointer will change to a
small rotating globe whenever it moves over the main Panorama window. If you
click the mouse in this state, the current map will be abandoned.

Select
------
The select menu, shows the various items that can be plotted on maps. Only
those items with a tick against them will actually be plotted. Items can be
toggled on and off in the usual way. Most of the items, have an associated
dialogue box that can be displayed by moving the mouse right. This usually
controls the colour that the item will be drawn in.

For Cities, there are two dialogue boxes, one for the point or bullet that
is used to mark the position of the city, the other for the text. Options on
these dialogue boxes, allow you to control the size of the bullet, whether
it is shown or not, and the form of the text for each city. The text options
allow the display of the city name, the country it is in, and for cities in
the USA, the state name. The point of these options, is that you can use
them to label countries or states as well as cities. For example, if you
wanted a map with just the name of countries shown, then you would deselect
show on the bullet dialogue box, and deselect name and USA on the text
dialogue box.

The size of the bullet and text should be set by experiment. For maps
showing lots of detail, it needs to be small, for large maps, big.

Detail
------
This controls how much detail will be shown on maps. 1 is the most detail,
and 5 the least. It is necessary to make a trade-off here. Plotting the
entire world at level 1, will produce a huge Draw file that will be very
difficult to handle. In general, levels 3 to 5 should be used for large
maps, and levels 1 and 2 reserved for small maps showing a lot of detail.
Normally you would use level 4 or 5 to work out the area of interest, then
use the Area facility to specify that for plotting. Finally, detail level 1
or 2 could be selected.

Detail also applies to cities, more will be shown at higher levels.

Plot
----
This controls the type of projection used to draw maps. The choices are;
Simple    - the coordinates are just plotted on linear x and y axes.
Cylinder  - the globe is projected onto a cylinder.
Mercator  - Mercators projection.
Satellite - a perspective projection that shows what the globe would look
            like from a point in space.

Area
----
This shows a dialogue box that controls how much will be plotted. The
numbers shown are the maximums and minimums of latitude and longitude in
degrees. For the satellite projection, the numbers are the longitude and
latitude of the satellite, and it's height in nautical miles.

As described before, Area should be used to constrain very detailed maps to
a manageable size.

The next two paragraphs do not apply to the satellite projection.

The area dialogue box is used if you want to plot just a map of a small
area. For example, a map of a single country. To do this, you enter in the
dialogue box the coordinates of a box that encloses the area to be plotted.
The coordinates entered, are those of the top right hand and bottom left
hand corners of the box. After typing in the coordinates, OK must be clicked
on. Clicking on Default, will set the coordinates back to the whole world.

There is an easy way of setting the values in this dialogue box. To do this,
use the select button on the mouse, click on the main window and drag the
mouse. A rotating box will appear. When you stop dragging, the area dialogue
box will appear with the coordinates already filled in. Simply click on OK
if you want to accept them.

After reducing the size of the area to be plotted, it will often be useful
to use the Zoom facility described next to make the main window size bigger.


Zoom
----
A standard RISC OS magnifier, that can be used to enlarge or reduce the
image in the main window. This can be very useful for examining areas of
maps in detail.

Choices
-------
Show coords. When this is ticked, a small window will appear in the top left
hand side of the main window. The numbers inside this, represent the latitude
and longitude of the mouse pointer in degrees. This is very useful, for
finding  the values to insert into the Area dialogue box.

Save allows all the settings in the dialogue boxes and menus to be saved.
This means that they don't have to be reset each time the program is run.


Files
=====

This section explains the format of the data files used by Panorama. All the
data is held in a number of files in the directory !Panorama.Data. The
cities are held in one form, and the outlines in another. This information,
is rather technical, and it is not necessary to understand what follows
unless you want to use the database yourself.

A typical line in the cities file looks like this;

 51.50    -0.13 5 London *UK
 
The first two numbers are the latitude and longitude of the city, the number
5 indicates the level of detail the city will be shown at. The *UK shows the
country the city is in. Alternatively, /state may follow the city name. The
city data file, is a text file, and can be loaded into Edit for changes to
be made.
 
 
The format of the other data files is more complex.

All coordinates are in minutes. The maximum latitude is 5400, the minimum
-5400. The maximum longitude is 10800, and the minimum -10800.  

Each point, consists of two header bytes which form a short integer,
optionally followed by one, two or four bytes. 

To interpret the header, take the word, and strip off the top two bits. If
the resulting number is greater or equal to 1000, then a header indicating
the start of a line follows. Two two byte integers follow, the coordinates
of the first point. If the header number is less than 1000, then the number
of following bytes, is determined by the top two bits of the header word. If
only the top bit is set, then two bytes follow, being the difference between
the current coordinates and the next point in latitude and longitude plus
128. If the next to top bit is set, one byte follows, the two nybbles of
this are again coordinate difference, but plus 8. Finally, if non of these
conditions are met, two two byte integers, the absolute point coordinates
follow. If the initial header value is less than 1000, then it shows the
level of detail that the point belongs to.
 


Credits
=======
Thanks to Jason Williams for loaning me his rotating globe. 
Thanks to the US CIA for making available the points in the database.
Acknowledgement of the work of the authors of World Databank III, and
Sat_Plot.




Release 1.14 July 2000



(c) Copyright David Pilling September 1991.

======
If you have any comments, suggestions, bug reports or complaints or would
like further copies of this disc or details of the many other discs available
for the Archimedes, please write to;

David Pilling
P.O. Box 22,
Thornton Cleveleys,
Blackpool.
FY5 1LR.
United Kingdom.

From time to time enhanced versions of discs will appear. You can upgrade
your copy to the latest one by sending your original disc with return postage
back to the above address.
