Kairon | Mac | Astrology

data entry • chart comparison • styles • methods • text manipulation • asteroids

Welcome to this tutorial on how Kairon 3's Text Engine works,

Texts

What Topics will this Tutorial explain?

What AAF is and How to Deal with it
What the Text Generator can allready do
What the Text Generator will be able to do soon

You can open the Text editor at any time by clicking the corresponding icon of your toolbar or by selecting "Text" from the "View" menu.

General about AAF

AAF is a shortcut for "Astrologisches Austausch Format"
and would be "Astrological Exchange Format" in english.

AAF is human readable and text only. This is why Kairon 3 also lets you edit the AAF-files directly in the "AAF-File" section of the "Text" view. AAF-Files usually contain a not limited number of charts. To find a specific chart more easily, selecting it's title in the "Charts" menu will also select it in the text view and scroll it in sight.
A chart generally is everything from the identifier "#A93:" until either the next "#A93:" or until the end of the file, like shown in this example. You can see further identifiers here, too. These identifiers are listed in strict hierarchical order and try to follow the natural flow of thought or usage. It is good to know what these mean for it allows both to trim a file to the essentials and delete anything not really needed and it also allows to manually remove possible errors where these occur.

#A93: is what a client normally will tell you in natural language. It is most essential and without it no valid chart is possible in AAF and generally the #A93: would be enough even. It consists of seven parameters separated by commas. "First name", "Last name", "kind of chart", date, time, "city", "state". These data are identified by their position between the commas, and if there are not exactly 6 commas, Kairon 3 will give out the error message: "Parameter Error" Wrong number of parameters in chunk #A93". In that case you can click the texts tab, search for the right spot and manually edit this line and see to it, that all is filled out properly. (A common mistake might be to fill in two first names and separate them by a comma rather than putting the second one into brackets or still better writing the second one into the comment field of the drawer). As AAF is a german format, the month is between the day and the year. If you edit a file manually you should be aware of this, as well as that a time is to be 24h time (which means that instad of 12:15 am you would write 0:15:00).

#B93: is the technical information an astrology application needs to exactly identify a chart. It identifies the birthtime to an exactness of about a few seconds and picts out the birthplace to 31 meters at its best (see colored databox below). It consists of five parameters again separated by commas that are julian day, latitude, longitude, timezone, daylightsaving information. These data are identified by their position between the commas, and if there are not exactly 4 commas, Kairon 3 will give out the error message: "Parameter Error" Wrong number of parameters in chunk #B93". In that case you can click the texts tab, search for the right spot and manually edit this line and see to it, that all is filled out properly.

A short note on the exact exactness of #B93:

Asuming the earth equator was about 40.000 kilometers and was split into 360° then every degree of longitude would be approximately 111 km of length at the equator and increasingly less north and south of it. Also, One degree of arc represents a timely difference of 4 minutes (24h/360°). This means, that if you have a city within about 100km of your city but don't know the ecact coordinates of the city you were born in, that every 100km of distance would only make an error of 4 minutes of time at the most.
And every minute of arc in longitude would therefore mark out about 4 seconds of time at the equator and would relate to a spot a bit less than two kilometers.
And every second of arc in longitude would therefore mark out about the fifteenth (sic!) part of a second!!! in time. So unless one knows the birthtime up to at least the 15th part of a second and the birthplace up to at least 31 meters, one must not think it would be really as exact as to what is being calculated by such an application.
And seen the other way round: if you know your birthtime to an exactness of 15 minutes it equals an error of 400km of the birthplace.
The Ascendant of a chart changes its sign about every two hours, so these 15 minutes would mark out an error of not even 4° on your ascendant (30°/8).

You should know that if there is a julian day in chunk "#B93:" that this julian day is dominant over the birth date and birth time. If you find these are false, and wish to manually fix that, you need to replace the julian day by a *.

#COM: marks out a comment, any text can be entered any way you like. The comment ends with either the end of file or with the next #.

#SRC: marks out a note on the source of the chart file and is treated in syntax like the comment.

You can easily copy paste charts from one AAF-File into another and you can also send AAF-Files via email. These are incredibly small information chunks and allow exact and fast recreation of your chart lists. Yet, whatever you do to your "AAF-File" section will only take effect on your chart and show the new changes, if you click the "update menus to changes" button at the bottom of Kairon 3's "Text" editor. You can also use Kairon 2.19's "Get AAF" button of its "Name, Data…" dialog to retrieve AAF-Information and copy paste it into Kairon 3's "AAF-File" section.

If you browse the internet, there are always some chart collections here and there that are already in aaf. Kairon's "Chart" menu is automatically updated when you open such a file. If that file contains too many entries, updating the "Chart" menu will slow down everything. So either don't click the menubar in such a case, or split such a collection into more handy parts.

The original home of AAF is at www.sternwerkstatt.de. There you get a lot more detailled information about it and are most welcome to also take part in developing it further.

What the Text Generator can already do

You find the Text editor by choosing "Text" from the "View" menu and might also need to click the "Generated Text" tab, in case the "AAF-File" view should be active. Depending on what information has been calculated with the methods tab (see tutorial on methods) you can already generate the kind of data listed in the buttons to its left.

To create this example i used the "inner Pos" button, copy-pasted the birth date and birth time from the AAF-File view and inserted a tab in front of each line using the tab key of the keyboard.
Then, after selecting the data part (Ascendant...Chiron), i moved the tabulators in the ruler on top to what you see them here.
The formatting of the headline was then done by playing with the entries of the "Format" menu. You can save any number of self created formats.

If the Text view is selected and you choose "Print…" from the "File" menu the text view will get printed. It will not be printed, if it is not selected. You can easily save such a text view as .rtf file and all your settings will be saved and if you reopen it with Kairon 3 or with Text edit, it will still look same. Yet, no chart information is save along with it. So, if you create such texts, they need to be save separte from the chart, but a remark can be put into the chart's comment, that such a text already exists and where you put it.

What the Text Generator will be able to do soon

The Text Generator will be taught to remember your notes on ANY constellations and will automatically generate custom lists for you based upon quite a deal of options you will be able to choose from.

And next? --> there will be lots more, just wait and see ;-)