The Gtopo settings file

Gtopo likes to "do things" in a hidden directory in your home directory with the name .gtopo. Although this directory is optional, it can be pretty handy. To make this directory, do this: 
cd
mkdir .gtopo
Then if you create a file named config in this directory, gtopo will read settings from this file when it starts up.

Blank lines and lines beginning with a # character are ignored. Anything after a # character on a line are ignored (so online comments are allowed). In general, anything gtopo cannot recognize is ignored.

Here is an example of a short settings file: 

# Size the viewing area
x_view 640
y_view 800

# Near Las Vegas Nevada
starting_lat 36.2338
starting_long -114.9894

Viewing Area

You can specify the size of the viewing area if you want to. 
x_view 640
y_view 800
The defaults of 640x800, although tall and narrow, serve nicely when saved and printed on standard 8.5 by 11 inch paper. Typically I start gtopo with the default size, and use a window manager button to make it expand to the full screen. If you are running gtopo on a dedicated laptop, it would make sense to have gtopo come up full screen initially.

Starting Location

You can (and should) specify the latitude and longitude of the starting point at the center of the gtopo viewing region. Since I set default coordinates in Arizona, you will be looking at a white screen if you load a set of maps in Texas. 
starting_lat 36:15:13.7
starting_long -114:55:05

I also abuse this setting when I have latitude and longitude coordinates of some place of interest. I edit then into the gtopo config file and then start gtopo and let it take me to that location. Someday I will add a location manager feature to gtopo that will be a sensible way to do this without stoppping and restarting the program.

Angles can be given as degrees with a fraction, or as degrees, minutes, and seconds separated by colons. Notice that west longitude is given as negative (which is the case over the entire continental United States).

Starting series

You can specify which map series to start up with via: 
starting_series 500K
The options are: state, atlas, 500K, 100K, and 24K.

Map Archives

A very useful feature of the settings file is the ability to tell gtopo where to find maps on disk. It has compiled into it, a number of places where I like to place the maps, but you may want to erase that and start over. To do so, use settings file entries like: 
# tell it where the maps are on disk.
clear_archive
add_archive /Users/topo
add_archive /var/topo
add_archive /home/bob/topo
The "archive" list is a list of pathnames where gtopo might be able to find maps, and it will look at all of them in order and accumulate everything it finds. This makes it possible to split up the storage of maps across several disks or partitions, or to organize things via directories. This can be especially useful if you are running gtopo on a laptop with a small disk and really need to spread things out among several partitions.

You cannot use the common ~ abbreviation for your home directory, spell out /home/joe or whatever it is.

If you do something wacky, like have a directory with spaces in its name, that is on the path to your map archives, you will need to enclose the path in double quotes like this: 

add_archive "/Programs/My wacky name/maps"

Cursor

If you find the central blinking cursor either too small, or at the other extreme, altogether annoying, you can change its size or turn it off entirely via: 

marker_size 5
center_marker off
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Gtopo / tom@mmto.org