Status Bar
On the bottom is the Status Bar(s). Activated from 'Tool Box-Show Status Bar'.
The top line, 'Chart Selection Bar', has the following description.
It shows all the available chart for the present view represented by one segment for each chart. The order between the segments represents the scale of the charts. Largest scale to the left, smallest to the right. If CM93 is available, it is always furthest to the right.
The segmented color bars in the Status Bar represent:
- Blue for Raster
- Green For ENC's
- Brown/Yellow for CM93 charts
- The current chart displays as a lighter shade of its color, or if quilting is active, the charts currently making up the quilt are displayed in lighter shade.
- The Chart bar below consisting of 12 segments shows a quilt of two active charts. Five charts in the quilt are hidden, due to small scale. CM93 is in it's place, to the right. Four charts of larger scale than the present view are available. The largest scale chart is a Transverse Mercator chart.
Limitation
The Chart Bar handles a maximum of 100 charts. The largest scale charts will be dropped first if more than 100 chart are available on a position. It is unlikely that this will be much of a limitation, but the possibility certainly exists if a lot of info charts, pilot charts and weather charts etc, are loaded. The syntom will be that large scale charts becomes impossible to display.
When you hover the mouse pointer over the bar, and not in quilting mode, a thumbnail of the chart will appear under the Scaling Charts icons and a chart information box will pop up just above the button. If quilting is on, instead of a thumbnail, the chart represented by the button will be highlighted in a transparent reddish color. By clicking on the appropriate bar, or using the appropriate Hot Keys, you will switch to the chart shown in the thumbnail. This feature is especially useful if you wish to view an ENC or a Raster chart of the same area.
The bottom line starting from the left, has the position of the GPS that feeds OpenCPN (your ship or boat). SOG, COG, Cursor (position), From Ownship and TrueScale and Zoom Factor are in other boxes. If the Zoom Factor is missing on the far right, the chart quilting feature is activated.
The buttons are displaying a lot more information however.
These buttons shows that the two charts are Transverse Mercator.
This button indicates that the chart is a Poly Conic chart.
This button shows that the chart is skewed.
This chart is excluded from quilting because of user action. Right
click to include in quilting again.
The raster chart represented by this button don't participate in the quilt because it is hidden by other, larger scale charts. Vector charts are represented similar.
To illustrate a lot of this, here is a screen shot in quilting mode.
The screen is a quilt of two Polyconical charts. Hovering the mouse pointer over the left chart-button highlights the lager scale chart for Manitowoc. Two smaller scale charts that cover the area displayed on the screen are included in the quilt, but are invisible as they are covered by the larger scale charts. To view these charts, right-click anywhere on a chart in the quilt and select "Remove this chart from quilt", one of these charts will now be shown in the quilt.
The Brown right most button shows that CM93 version 2, charts are available for the area, but not currently displayed.
The information box shows relevant information about the chart. We can see that the chart is Polyconic, and because of this a warning is displayed for poor accuracy. The reason is, that although Polyconic charts are allowed to participate in quilting, the result is not totally free from errors, however small.