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README - SPECKIFY Version 0.9.132
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WHAT IS SPECKIFY?

  Speckify is a tool for processing ASCII astrophysical databases
  consisting of fixed-width fields contain coordinate and distance
  information for a catalog of objects, with one line per object.
  Speckify will output the processed data into an ASCII-formatted file
  meant for use in planetarium simulation software.  The current
  default output is in the form of a "speck" file defined with a
  Partiview-format (www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/partiview/),
  which contains Cartesian coordinates of the catalog objects (in
  user-specified units and coordinate systems).  Speckify's
  easy-to-use graphical user interface also allows additional data
  fields to be written to the file.

  Speckify requires the FLTK (fast light tool kit) library.  Go to
  www.fltk.org to download and for installation instructions.

  If you find speckify to be useful for your work, an acknowledgment
  of it would be greatly appreciated in any papers published or media
  distributed that make use of products created with the tool.

LICENSING

  Speckify comes with free source code, and is available uder the
  terms of the GNU General Public License.

BUILDING AND INSTALLING SPECKIFY UNDER UNIX

  Speckify should compile with a simple "make" call.  An additional
  script, "recomp", will delete the output directories containing the
  intermediate make results, forcing a full re-compilation.  (This is
  useful if you have made a change only to a header *.h file, and not
  a source file.)

  After compilation, the speckify executable can be called to start
  the program.

  The man page for speckify is DOC/speckify.1.gz.  This should be sudo
  copied to the man1 location, typically /usr/share/man/man1.  (If
  your man pages are bzipped instead of gzipped -- i.e., have a bz2
  suffix, you will need to uncompress the file, and recompress it with
  the bzip2 utility.)

BUILDING SPECKIFY UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS

  Speckify has been successfully compiled with Visual C++ Studio
  Express Edition on Windows XP, but so far, it has not run without
  crashing!  Feel free to fix any bugs to make it run on Windows as
  well as on Unix platforms.

COPYRIGHT

  Speckify is copyright 2009 by Ka Chun Yu.

  The Speckify software tool 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.

  Speckify is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.  See the GNU General Public License for more
  details.

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