Perpetual Chinese Calendar

LunarCal  User's Guide - Configuration

Configurating LunarCal

LunarCal's configuration has been improved.  Now you can also select your choice of font for the Unicode version of the program. You cannot select font for the non-Unicode version.

Adding, editing and deleting cities are also much easier now as they are integrated into onw common screen.

Time Format

LunarCal used Civil Time for display. It does not support Delta Time as yet.

Hour Display Format

You can choose to display time in 12-hour or 24-hour format.

Home City
When you first run LunarCal it will select Beijing as the default Home City. You may change the default Home City by highlighting it on the above configuration screen and hit the "SAVE Config" button. You can also select your choice of colors and font for the program to use.

The city selected will be the Home City. LunarCal always starts up with the Home City. After startup, the Home City become the Active City for the current session.  However you may during any session select another city. This city is known as the Active City. LunarCal will use this Active City for all subsequent calculations and this city is valid for the current session only. When you save the Database, the Active City will be recorded as the new Home City and will start up with this city in all future program execution.

Note: If you delete the current City or the Home City. LunarCal will select the previous or the next city as your current location. You will need to reselect your location.

Daylight Saving Time

Presently, LunarCal does not automatically take into consideration daylight saving as I am still in the process of gathering information of world daylight saving.

Please note: Accurate configuration of your time zone information is very important for the proper functioning of LunarCal. The program internally uses GMT (UTC) time for the planetary formulae and this GMT (UTC) is obtained from your GMT offset data you entered against your time zone. If your GMT offset is incorrect, LunarCal will give you incorrect Moon phase, moon rise/set, etc.

For users who experience Daylight saving in their country, you can overcome this by creating duplicate records of your home city and give it different city names, such as Sydney STD for Standard time and Sydney DST for daylight saving time. Then enter different GMT offset times and selecting the appropriate city.

I am in the process of implementing daylight saving for all major world cities.

Colors

You may select any color from the popup color palette. Just click on the "Text", "Background", Today Box" or "Lunar Day 1 & 15" buttons on the configuration screen to change colors. Basically the default colors are selected to allow easy viewing.

If you happen to stuff up the display by selecting strange colors, you can recover from it by exiting the program and go to the LunarCal folder and delete LunarCal.Cfg file. Restart LunarCal and reselect you options and then save it.

Fonts (Typeface)

You can change the display to the font face you prefer. Although you may lots of fonts installed on your PC, only TrueType and OpenType fonts that supports Chinese characters are available for selection. You may have many Chinese fonts installed but not all are compatible with LunarCal. When you select a typeface, LunarCal displays a sample of what the typeface looks like at the bottom of the screen.

Please be aware that some fonts (even commercial ones) may have missing characters (glyphs) while some fonts does not support diacritic characters.