AstroJournal

Author: Piero Dalle Pezze

Mailing list: astrojournal AT googlegroups.com

Forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/astrojournal

Description

This software utility aims to generate LaTeX / PDF structured documents from astronomy observation reports created as basic tables.

Main Features

• Generation of a PDF document containing all user observation reports collected by increasing target catalogue number. This is useful for comparing targets observed over time.
• Generation of a PDF document containing all user observation reports collected by decreasing date. This is useful for visualising one’s observations by session.
• Generation of a PDF document containing the targets observed by constellation. This is useful for checking observed and unobserved targets by constellation.
• Generation of a TXT document containing all user observation reports collected by decreasing date. This is useful for copying and pasting reports with any text editor.
• Extraction of basic statistics from the reports.

Download and Run

The latest stable release of AstroJournal can be downloaded here.

A user manual is provided with the package in the doc folder.

After downloading and uncompressing the file, open the folder and run AstroJournal as follows:

# On GNU/Linux or Mac OS X type or click:
./astrojournal.sh

or

# On Windows, click:
astrojournal.exe

This will start a simple graphical user interface to generate the journals. To run AstroJournal via command line,

# On GNU/Linux or Mac OS X type:
./astrojournal.sh -c

Please use the option -h (--help) to see the available options.

Requirements

To use AstroJournal you need to install:

• Java 1.7+

• TeX Live (for GNU/Linux users only)

• MikTeX (for Windows users only)

• MacTeX (for Mac OS X users only)

Additional notes for installing AstroJournal dependencies:

GNU/Linux Debian/Ubuntu 14.04+

Users can install the LaTeX dependencies required by AstroJournal with the following command:

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-recommended

The creation of a deb package is currently in progress.

Windows

Users should install MikTeX and then the LaTeX packages url and mptopdf using MikTeX Manager.

Mac OS X

Users should install MacTeX. I have not tested this directly. If the command pdflatex is not available, I think it should be possible to create a link called pdflatex to the corresponding program used by MacTeX to compile LaTeX code. In addition, to run AstroJournal on a MAC OS X platform, some steps are required since Mac OS X still uses Java 1.6 while AstroJournal requires Java 1.7+:

• Download the latest Java from https://java.com/en/download/mac_download.jsp;
• Follow the procedure for installing the package.
• Unfortunately, Mac OS X installs this version of Java as Plugin, and this is not in the $PATH environment variable. To correct this, 1) open the application Terminal; 2) type nano ~/.bash_profile ; 3) write at the beginning of the file the following instruction: export PATH=/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents/Home/bin/:$PATH (there is a SPACE after Internet*) ; 4) hold the button Control while pressing the button x ; 5) press the button y (Yes) ; Press the button Enter / Return ; 5) close Terminal. To test: start Terminal and type java -version. It should report a version above 1.6. As of the time this README was written, it prints java version "1.8.0_66"*. This procedure is required for the first time only.
• Download AstroJournal, unzip the file, and enter the application folder.
• Enter the folder target.
• Click astrojournal-x.x.x-jar-with-dependencies.jar
• Mac OS X will ask for permissions to execute the file. Answer Yes. This may require the user to disable special controls in Mac OS X in System Preference > Security & Privacy. In particular at least the radio box Mac App Store and identified developers should be selected.
• AstroJournal should start correctly now.