### mercator-1.0.24 README file

    Mercator 1.0 pre-alpha

    You have been warned....

    N.B. The Command control key is Alt on Unix, Control on Windows and
    Command on the Mac.

    Installation

    1) Make sure you have tcl/tk installed. Preferably the latest version
       which is 8.2.1 on the Mac and 8.2.2 everywhere else. You can
       get tcl/tk from ftp.scriptics.com and I keep copies of the latest
       versions on the catless ftp site as well.

    2) On Windows, double click on the winstall.tcl icon, goto 3
       On Unix run installMercator, goto 3
       On the Mac, unpack the mercator.sea.hqx file and run the extractor
       if it hasn't automatically, goto 5

    3) Fill in the field in the installer window

    4) Hit install

    5) Then you can run mercator
         On Windows by  double clicking on mercator.tcl
         On Unix by running mercator
         On Mac by double clicking the Mercator icon

    The System:

    The "Command" key varies. On Unix it is Alt, on Windows it is Control and
    on the Mac it is Command.

    There are three parts to the window :

    The tracker which simply is a list of all the nodes that you have
    selected and brought to the middle. Command-l hides this. Double
    clicking on one of the items makes that one the centre (even if its
    text name has changed) You can use button-2 to pull the contents around
    to view them. I would like to know if anyone finds this feature useful,
    and if so how can I improve it?

    The main display window which can be seen either as a tree structure
    with parents at the top, kids at the bottom and friends at left and
    right, or as a centred diagram. You can change the view using the View
    menu. You can turn on and off showing off parents, kids and/or friends.
    Command-c goes to centred, Command-t goes to tree. Command-r redraws the
    window in the current view which will attempt to lay things out so that
    they dont overlap. (ha ha ha ha) (There are no scrollbars - maybe there
    should be or maybe some other display management policy - tell me what
    you want). Resizing the window maintains the existing layout, but if you
    then redraw the layout will shift to use the different space that is available.
    Outline mode shows the map as a text outline, but at the moment you cannot
    do anything with it.

    At the bottom of this window is a set of inkpots that allow you to colour
    the links between the nodes. There are also some lines that let you pick the
    thickness of the links that are created. I might add some notion of direction
    as well. In the centered view parent, friend and child links are supposed
    to display using different dot patterns, but it doesn't show up very well.

    The rightmost part is the node information window which shows data
    connected with the current selected node. You can toggle this by hitting
    Command-i. Currently you cannot have several nodes open at once.

    When a node is highlighted in blue, keystrokes are entered in its name
    field. The name displayed is truncated if necessary on the display but
    not in storage.

    When a new node is added it becomes the selected node.

    Fast Add mode is supposed to let you type a sequence of node names terminated
    by a return and have them all created. it is not quite correct yet though.

    To make a new node mouse down on one of the coloured blobs and pull and
    release. The top blob gives new parents, the sides friends and the
    bottom children. These distinctions may have no value or may even be
    useful!

    Control clicking on a node brings it to the centre. Mouse button 2 (or 3
    if you have one) down brings up a menu which lets you do various things.
    In particular it lets you unlink/relink a node which causes it to grey out
    and will only display if you have the show deleted item checked on the View
    menu. If You "unlink all" then the node and all its children will be unlinked.
    Relink reverses this process. Destroy really does delete the node.

    The Stash item remembers the node and you can then create a link to it
    from any other node in the diagram using the Link item - you can chose the
    kind of link that is made of course. Currently these "extra" links will not
    always display - I am working on this one. (Selecting "Show All Links"
    ought to toggle the display but the code is not working and is disabled)

    Nodes that have no parents are listed on the Roots menu. This lets you have
    several distinct trees in a chart (though of course they can be linked by
    friends links). Again, the interface to this could probably be cleaner
    and easier to use.

    Right-mousing on a Link brings up an equivalent menu for Links. Internally
    there are many other things that you can do with links, but at the moment
    the interface is not done.

    I tried to support right-mousing on the background so that you could a general
    menu, but doing this broke the link popup menus so I have removed the feature
    for the moment - I will try and find out the cause of the problem and fix it
    of course.

    Other Bindings

    Home takes you to the start node of the chart.

    Shortcut keys are shown next to the commands on the menus.