Display of Lat and Lon ?

[gmac52]

Already searched the forum for an answer to this question to no avail. In OpenCPN is there a way to change the display of Lat and Lon to degrees, minutes, seconds. I prefer that to the default of degrees and decimal minutes.

Thanks in advance,

George Mac

[nohal]

Right now it's not possible. But as I was rewriting the coordinate parser earlier today, I will probably submit also a patch allowing the display in different formats.

Pavel

[S/V Alchemy]

That would be handy indeed.

[nohal]

Plain decimal degrees, DD MM.MM and DD MM SS are enough as far as formats go?

Pavel

[boasun]

Originally Posted by nohal

Plain decimal degrees, DD MM.MM and DD MM SS are enough as far as formats go?

Pavel

Which one you display depends on your charts. Carefully perusing your chart to see if they are dregrees, minutes and tenths there of or whether the chart is degree, minutes & seconds. Then you will have an easier time plotting the fix on the chart or finding a published item from their cordinates.

GPS is an excellent navigation tool. But have other means to navigate with also.

[PjotrC]

Originally Posted by nohal

Plain decimal degrees, DD MM.MM and DD MM SS are enough as far as formats go?

Pavel...

Great you are aiming at this! The DD.DDDDDDDDD is needed as well, as this is the output format from OCPN into GPX... should be possible to feed it back...

Please make sure the copy-paste will work directly from major sources (Admiralty, NGA, Google Earth etc).

I think it would be wise to allow somehow a single line input of coordinates. Usually they are presented as a single chunk (LAT, LON), so it is a nuisance to split them into separate fields of LAT and LON.

Will be one more reason to drop the 1.3.6 finally (quilting still drags the perf heavily)

Piotr

[nohal]

Piotr,
have a look at FS#462 : [PATCH] Improved latitude/longitude parser
I can hardly imagine having a more universal parser
I was thinking about a one-line input already and it complicates the things quite a lot. Not that it's not doable, of course, but thinking of all the possible "valid" combinations makes me feel a bit sick. Anyway will it's time come next time I will want to paste in something from the web...

Pavel

[HappySeagull]

It's weird,but OpenCPN's newer betas actually accept decimal degrees in marks ".-"signs too.I've copied/pasted quite a few in per gpx etc.

[PjotrC]

Originally Posted by nohal

I can hardly imagine having a more universal parser

Pavel,

Never underestimate the imagination of Hydrographic Authorities...

I posted in the 523 Beta thread an example of interpretation of a standard Admiralty coordinate format, the most widely used. Generally, the new parser has problems with unusual (for programmers) separator sequences. Forums - Post 416763">Here you can find some other strange examples. With all respect to various National HOs, Admiralty is by far the most important, and even if only one extended format should be allowed I'd pick this one.

Completely dropping the minutes would not be so dangerous, because this is immediately noticeable, but taking minute fractions for seconds can well go unnoticed, and 1/2 a mile off can get you well into trouble.

I very often annote the charts with new features and dangers. For a 4-cornered area editing this by hand means ca. 40 additional key-mouse strokes. For bigger things, like 30-odd positions area boundary or a set of TSS lanes or 80 postions of measurement buoys, I use an OpenOffice spreadsheet macro to convert the coordinate format and a Python script to generate GPX, but this is too heavy for a simple feature, so I use then my 136 parser...

So the ability to paste directy from UKHO does help a lot.

Still hoping,

Piotr

[nohal]

Piotr,
forgot where that list of yours was... Will submit an extension of the parser for the next beta.

Pavel