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Geologic Time Scale (0.5)
by
Ihor Berehulyak
—
last modified
2009-01-13
Released on 2007-02-22 by Jeff Pittman for Plone 2.0 under GPL - GNU General Public License available for Linux.
Software development stage: alpha
- Geologic Time Scale download link: http://plone.org/products/geologictimescale/releases
- Homepage of Geologic Time Scale: http://www.geojeff.org/geologictimescale/
- Description source: http://www.geojeff.org/software/geologictimescale/
GeologicTimeScale is a graphics generating product that uses the Report Lab toolkit for graphics file creation and custom methods to emit SVG code. The alpha version offers all the graphic generation types offered by ReportLab (PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF, PICT, PS, and SVG) and there is a special custom-generated SVG version that includes rollover effects.
GeologicTimeScale uses the ReportLab toolkit to generate the geologic time scale using data from the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) website (http://www.stratigraphy.org), which is based on:
- Gradstein, F.M., Ogg, J.G., Smith, A.G. (coordinators), 2005. A Geologic Time Scale 2004. Cambridge University Press, 610 pages. You may see a photo of Felix Gradstein and Jim Ogg at http://stratigraphy.org/jimfelix.jpg, holding a copy of the book.
and
- the "GeoWhen" dataset by Robert A. Rohde, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of California, Berkeley (http://www.stratigraphy.org/geowhen/index.html).
GeologicTimeScale is a folderish Archetypes-based Plone/Zope product. The idea is to use various renderers to create images, PDF files, and/or SVG versions of the time scale and store them. This allows flexibility for a user of GeologicTimeScale to offer several format versions, if needed. GeologicTimeScale takes input of the following items:
- image size (width and height, in pixels)
- position (x and y of upper left corner, in pixels)
- start and end time (in millions of years)
- a setting for scale-to-fit
- choice of a simplified or full version
- optional range events, entered as comma-separated values on separate lines
for the events. Range events are specified by:
- label placement (top, bottom, left, right, center, relative to the vertical bar that will mark the event)
- label angle (0 for horizontal, 90 for vertical, or any other angle)
- x position (same dimension as time, in millions of years)
- end time (in millions of years)
- start time (in millions of years; note that end < start)
- text (not word wrapped, presently)
- color - changed to a SelectColumn with a few colors. (considering use of ATColorPickerWidget)
- optional point-in-time events, entered as comma-separated values:
- label placement (top, bottom, left, right, center, relative to the symbol that will mark the event)
- label angle (0 for horizontal, 90 for vertical, or any other angle)
- x position (same dimension as time, in millions of years)
- time (in millions of years)
- symbol type (ellipse or rect)
- symbol width
- symbol height
- text
- color - just a few colors for now (see comment above under range events)
