My GSoC 2011 project finished

So, after three months of work, GSoC 2011 has reached the end. It’s been a great and rewarding experience for me. I hope that everybody enjoyed and completed their projects. Special thanks go to my mentors: Akarsh Simha and Victor Carbune, SoK student Samikshan Bairagya, everybody in KStars team and to Lydia Pintscher, who kept all the things running and to Google, for making GSoC 2011 happen 🙂

Now is the right time to make a summary of what I have done during my project.

Added and changed features

• Multiple changes to sky image export feature: added the option to add legends to exported images (with the option to preview them before the export) and SVG file support.
• Added multiple types of legends, with scales, magnitudes chart, symbols list.
• A few changes to flags feature: correct support for locale-characteristic characters, the option to add/edit/delete flags directly from sky map via context menu and the ability to add flags without icon images (text-only). Apart from that, user can now edit flags after they are created.
• Multiple FOV export support: now it’s possible to export multiple field of view snapshots containing images of sky fragments inside area defined by active FOV symbol.
• Star hopper-based FOV export: this is experimental feature that needs tuning (mainly to the star hopper tool itself). It allows user to automatically capture field of view snapshots in a way convenient for star hopping.
• Logging forms containing basis fields embedded in finder charts.
• Details tables: general, position, rise/set/transit, asteroid/comet details.
• Finder charts that can contain logging forms, multiple field of view snapshots, details tables and notes.
• Added Printing Wizard that gathers all the stuff together, and enables user to customize their finder charts.

Despite I’ve managed to complete all features listed in my proposal, I am sure that I’ll continue to work on KStars as I’ve came up with many new ideas during the work on my project.

A few screenshots

Here are a few screenshots from Printing Wizard, which let’s user to configure all the options related to printing finder charts with other goodies.

Object selection step

Common field of view configuration step

Star hopper field of view export configuration

Browsing captured FOV snapshots

Additional chart content selection step

Example finder chart

Example finder chart, showing what can be included in finder charts: PDF / ODT.

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FOV export, finder chart and logging forms done

Three more weeks to go, and just a few things are left to do in my project, namely printing wizard and star hopper based FOVs export (the later is mostly done).

During last three weeks I’ve managed to finish user-defined FOV representation export function, finder charts and logging forms (some minor TODOs are still left, but these are rather related to formatting & layout corrections). Now I am working on printing wizard, that will enable to access all of the new KStars printing features in a way (hopefully) convenient to user. I’ll put here a few printouts created with new printing features as soon as printing wizard is done (I plan to end it next week).

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