Radio Eyes Help
Active Labels can display pictures of the following types:
These are the most common types of images found on the internet. Active Labels cannot display animated GIFs or streaming content. A pre-requisite of using an image from the internet is that it's name does not change, that is, the image must always be retrievable given a specific URL or file.
Writing Active Label scripts for pictures is actually a bit easier than writing these scripts for text retrieval. An example script is shown below:
LS_Timeout = 88
LS_Picture
LS_URL
=http://www.ips.gov.au/Images/Solar/Culgoora%20Observatory/Spectrographs/Real%20Time/realtime.gif
LS_Redirect =http://www.ips.gov.au
LS_Height =120
LS_Width =200
LS_Text = Culgoora Spectrograph
LS_End
This script retrieves the most recent spectrograph image from the Culgoora radio spectrograph. The script works because (at least currently) this image is retrievable from the LS_URL = address shown above. If you were to copy the URL into the address bar of your browser, the browser would retrieve the image, (without the page content on the web page where the image is usually accessed).
To find out the specific URL for an image, navigate your browser to the appropriate web page where you would normally access the image. Then RIGHT click on the image and select Properties. The URL is displayed on the properties page for the image (Note: Internet Explorer is used in this example, other browsers may have slightly different procedures.) This is the URL that will applied as a parameter to the LS_URL = command.
In this example we set the LS_Timeout = command to 88. This is an arbitrary value and could be set to something lower for a fast internet connection. It is the amount of time in seconds after which we give up waiting for the image to be retrieved from the internet. One down side of active labels is that they do stop normal program functions while waiting for the content to be downloaded. Shorter timeout values are thus desirable.
The LS_Picture command informs the script engine that a picture is expected as the type of data returned from the URL. If not specified the script engine would expect text.
The LS_Redirect command is not necessary, but sometimes handy. This command provides a URL to which a browser will be automatically opened if the Active Label id double clicked on the sky map.
LS_Height = and LS_Width = commands specify the height and width of the displayed Active Label image on the sky map. These values do not have to match the actual image size downloaded from the internet. The picture will be compressed or stretched to pit in the the specified area.
LS_Text = makes the following text the tooltip text for the label. Tooltips are those little text boxes that sometimes appear when you let your mouse hover over an object.
LS_End of course, marks the end of the script..
Active Labels
Writing Active Label Scripts
Adding Labels
Editing Labels