What Topics will this Tutorial explain?

• How the Preferences Mechanism Works
• How to Edit the Name, Color and Glyph of an Object
• How to Exclude an Object from some or all Aspect Calculation
• How to Customize the Calculation of Element Values

How the Preferences Mechanism Works

Kairon 3 no longer uses a separate preference in every chart file, but carries an unlimited number of preference files in the folder "kPref" int the "Kairon" folder (/Applications/Kairon/kPref). This makes documents smaller and allows to watch every chart with any settings at any time. The easiest way to switch from one Preferences file to another is to doubleclick such a file in the finder. Kairon will then open a new window and will have reset its internal preference path to the new document. You can ever watch the actually active preferences path (along with all other paths used by Kairon 3) by tabbing to the "Files" section of the "Preferences" dialog.

You can open the "Preferences" dialog by selecting "Preferences…" from the "Kairon 3" menu or by simply clicking the "Prefs" Icon of your toolbar (See the first part of Tutorial 2 on how to customize your toolbar) like it is shown here.

Kairon 3 allows only one open preference file at a time, so a preference will always apply to all open files. This should allow more focus on the actual topics of a chart rather than allowing too much emotional distraction by colors that may have been valid in some respect, but would only be disturbing in another. So, while prior versions of Kairon had been using colors more chart specific, now these colors are more topic specific or more day specific.

How to Edit the Name, Color and Glyph of an Object

An object (planet, arabic point, asteroid, hypothetical planet) can now have any color, any custom name and any glyph of any font you may wish. There is no restriction on this and, once set up, any preference file can be used with any chart. All this and even more is set up after selecting the "Styles" tab of the preferences dialog:
to make it a bit easier to follow this text, i have added some arrows to the above screenshot.

Before you do anything else, best set up your preferred colors by adding them into the grid as shown above: Click on the button below the label "Color" to show the displayed colors wheel, then play around until you have a color to your liking and drag it from the field on top down into the grid at the bottom. The grid is expanded simply by dragging the tiny dot i marke out by a red circle. Once done set over to step 2 and first click on the "List all Symbols" button, make sure the now showing up letters are all selected and click the "Change Font" button and choose a font to your liking. Kairon 3's default font is "Kairon Semiserif" which was installed automatically with Kairon 3. Any font used by Kairon will be needed by it to display its graphics and therefore should never be deactivated in the finder. Use the vertical slider or the little input field above it to resize your just inserted glyphs until you can easily see all their details. That size will not be of any other avail than to let you better see what you are doing.

This all done you can now conveniently step through the entire preference and can do quick changes here and there. To step, use the radio buttons on top along with the stepper near the object name entry field (here displaying the word "Mars").
To change a glyph, copy it into the text field with the label glyph. The glyph will change to a mere letter, but the moment you hit the "apply" button, the large symbol (here set to mars, represented by letter e of font Kairon Semiserif) will show up in new style.
To customize a glyph, use the slider to its left to move it up and down, use the slider on top to move it right and left and us the slider to the right to resize.

Any change you wish Kairon 3 to remember must be followed by a hit on the "Apply Changes" button. Otherwise the next click on the stepper will reset your object to what it has been before. This way you can better experiment with the size and color without needing to fear you might accidentally overwrite a precious setting. Every hit on the "Apply Changes" button already saves your changes right into the active preferences file.

How to Exclude an Object from some or all Aspect Calculation

In short, this is all accomplished by one single number, the "Orbis %". This value is taken into consideration the moment Kairon 3 attempts to calculate an aspect. It defines, how much of the actual orbis to which an aspect is set is used. The default setting for all objects is 100, which means that the orbis is to 100% allowed. So, if in the aspect section of the preferences dialog you allow an orbis of 8° to your trines and if the trines are activated by the checkbox to their left, and if the "Orbis %" of all objects is set to 100, then all trines will ever be recognized and drawn as trines +-8°. If you would now set the "Orbis %" of e.g. the ascendant to zero, and the "Orbis %" of e.g. the sun to 100, then their shared "Orbis %" value would be 50(shared value = (value1+value2)/2) and they would only indicate a trine with said orb of 8° if the actual orbis was less than 4°, because 50% of 8° used make 4°. This way you can set up a planet so that it only is taken into account if it has very exact aspects, while another object may be more important to you and you allow it to be taken into consideration with also weaker aspects.

So, the lesser the value of the "Orbis %" of an object is, the more exact an aspect must be so that it is shown with this object. If you wish to exclude an object from all aspects, but still have it drawn into the chart, set its "Orbis %" to -100 (this will exclude it from all aspects with objects whose "Orbis %" not more than 100 and you should not set any "Orbis %" to more than 100, even though its would technically be possible, because it would mess up with your general orbis limit and some aspects might even overlap each other so that you would never know if an aspect actually is the aspect it claims to be or another with too much tolerance).

How to Customize the Calculation of Element Values

Still in the styles section of the preferences dialog you find these buttons and this entry field: It introduces a new, more specific way of calculating element values than the custom method.
Anyways, you can easily return to any standard behaviour you may be used to or give this new method a chance.

You may already be familiar with the number shown here: every planet is asigned points according to its asumed relative importance. So, if a panet is in a fire sign, depending on its number of points it will add this value to the fire depot. But, to me it seems not very reasonable, if a person has moon in aries, to consider it as even more fiery than if it had mars in aries, for moon acconts for 4 points and mars only for three. A water sign like the moon can never contribute to fire, it can only loose its watery quality. So Kairon 3 allows asigning elements to any object, as also it allows not to. In case of the moon the default is set to water, and in case of the mars the default is set to fire. These two are easy. Planets that are not that clear i have left out from defaulting them. If left out, all is at it has ever been. (The standard setting asigns 5 points to the major lights sun and moon, 4 points to ascendant and mc, 3 for the personal planets mercury, venus and mars, two for mars and saturn and one for the transpersonal planets along with some asteroids, where they are selected: an object that is not selected, i.e. not drawn into the chart, is not considered for element calculation).

But how is this new method now taken into account?

as there are four elements, there are four kinds of wellness an object may get into:

• fire in fire is full wellness (two additional points)
• fire in air is half wellness (one additional point)
• fire in earth is half weakness (one point lost)
• fire in water is total weakness (two points lost)

the additional points will simply be added to the already won points.