INSTALLATION ============ To install JCAL on your hard disk insert the floppy disk and make the floppy drive your default drive by typing A: (or substitute your floppy drive for the letter A). Then type INSTALL. The program will be installed on your C: drive in a directory called JCAL. If you do not want to use the C: drive do the installation by typing INSTALL [X] where [X] (no colon) is the letter of the drive you want to use. SUNSET TIMES ============ When Item 4 is selected from the menu the time of sunset is shown for the Gregorian date selected. You can therefore calculate the time of sunset for any holiday as well as for the sabbath. The time of sunset is used to determine the time of candlelighting. It is customary to light candles on the Sabbath between 1 1/4 hours and 18 minutes before sunset. Since sunset varies according to one's location, it is necessary to tell the computer where you are. The calculation is controlled by parameters in a file called JCAL.SUN. It consists of five lines. They must contain the following: Line 1: City Name Line 2: Latitude (Latitudes south of the Equator are negative) Line 3: Longitude (East of Greenwich are negative) Line 4: Universal Time correction (zones east of Greenwich are negative) Line 5: Name of time zone All lines must be present. Latitude and longitude are in degrees and minutes with a decimal point between them. Thus 45 degrees, 37 minutes is written 45.37 Universal Time correction is according to the following table: Standard Daylight Eastern 5 4 Central 6 5 Mountain 7 6 Pacific 8 7 Latitude and Longitude of common cities are as shown: Latitude Longitude New York 40.45 73.59 Los Angeles 34.03 118.14 Chicago 41.52 87.38 Dallas 32.47 96.47 Miami 25.46 80.11 Montreal 45.30 73.33 San Francisco 37.46 122.24 Johannesburg -26.10 -28.02 (time correction = -1.5) Jerusalem 31.47 -35.13 (time correction = -3) Coordinates for other cities can be found in an Almanac. If the file is found to be missing a default file is automatically created which looks like this: New York 40.45 73.59 5 EST New files can be created with any text editor or the default file can be edited. Its name must be JCAL.SUN. COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS ======================= There are two command line parameters that can be used when starting the program. The letter "n" will tell the program that there should be No opening screen and the letter "m" will start the program in a Monochrome mode. The latter uses two intensities of white characters on a black background and may give a better appearance on monochrome or composite monitors. Command line parameters can be entered in any order and can be upper or lower case. They are separated by a space. For example: to start JCAL (version 7.6) in monochrome and without the opening screen enter "JCAL76 m n". Note that you will need about 140k of available memory to run JCAL with the text file resident (selection 7) and about 80k without the text file resident You will be informed if the text file will not fit into memory. JCAL UTILITIES ============== The full version of JCAL is supplied with several utilities that can be used in conjunction with other software to convert between Gregorian and Jewish dates. J2G.EXE (Jewish-to-Gregorian) converts Jewish dates to Gregorian, G2J.EXE (Gregorian-to-Jewish) converts Gregorian dates to Jewish and READINGS.EXE supplies the Torah readings for the Sabbath following the Jewish date entered. They accept their inputs as command line parameters and send their outputs to the screen or to a file by redirection. Other application software such as dBASE III can execute them as a DOS program using the RUN command. Most programming languages have equivalent commands. BASIC uses the SHELL command and Turbo Pascal uses the EXEC command. dBase programmers, however, may want to use the binary files described later. G2J.EXE This program is executed by entering the following command: G2J MM/DD/YYYY MM/DD/YYYY is the Gregorian date to be converted such as 7/30/1936. Month and Date can be single digits but the year must be four digits. The delimiter can be "/", "-", or "," . Thus 1-1-1989 or 3,17,1918 are also acceptable inputs. The output is in the form MM/DD/YYYY. Month and date may be single digits but the year is always four digits. The months are given in numeric form as follows: Tishri 1 Heshvan 2 Kislev 3 Tevet 4 Shevat 5 Adar 6 Adar II 13 (when leap year); Nisan 7 Iyyar 8 Sivan 9 Tammuz 10 Av 11 Elul 12 Assigning the number 13 instead of 7 to Adar II allows the subsequent months to retain their same numbers whether leap year or not. Thus Nisan is always month 7 and Elul is always month 12 making application programming and data entry easier. Examples: G2J 7/28/1988 -- Sends 11/14/5748, the Jewish equivalent of July 28, 1988, to the screen. G2J 4,20,1970 > DFP.DAT -- Sends 7/14/5730, the Jewish equivalent of April 20, 1970, to a file called DFP.DAT. There is a special command line parameter, "T" or "t", for converting Today's date to the Jewish equivalent. Today's date is read from the computer's calendar and assumes it is correctly set. This output is formatted in a more readable form. Thus if today is July 30, 1988: G2J T - Sends "Sat, Av 16, 5748" to the screen. This command can be added to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file so the current Jewish date will be shown on the screen whenever you power up your computer. G2J must be accessible to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Using "TB" will give a "brief" output in the form of MM/DD/YYYY which is less readable but is convenient for piping into READINGS.EXE as described below. Example: G2J TB - Sends 11/16/5748 to the screen if today is July 30, 1988. J2G.EXE This program is executed by entering the following command: J2G MM/DD/YYYY S MM/DD/YYYY is the Jewish date to be converted such as 11/15/5748. Month and Date can be single digits but the year must be four digits. The date delimiter can be "/", "-", or "," . S is the number of successive years. It can be any size but the larger the number the longer the computation time. S is optional and defaults to 1 if not used. The outputting of successive years is particularly useful when calculating anniversaries and Yahrzeits for several years ahead. The output is in the form MM/DD/YYYY. Here, too, month and date may be single digits but the year is always four digits. The months are given in numeric form as described above. Remember that "13" is used to designate the leap year month of Adar II. Examples: J2G 11/16/5748 -- Sends 7/30/1988 to the screen. J2G 7/14/5730 20 > OUTFILE.DAT -- Sends 20 successive Gregorian dates starting with 4/20/1970 to a file named OUTFILE.DAT. READINGS This program takes the Jewish date entered at the command line and outputs the Torah reading for the Sabbath following that date. If no command line parameter is entered, the program waits for a date to be entered on the next line. NOTE THAT NO PROMPT IS SUPPLIED. This is done so that the output is only the Torah reading which can be redirected to another file without clutter. Examples: READINGS 11/11/5709 > BAR -- Sends "Va-Ethannan, Deut 3:23 -7:11" to a file called BAR. The ability of this program to accept input on a separate line without command line parameters makes it particularly easy to have its input supplied by piping it from G2J as illustrated below. G2J 8/6/1949 | READINGS will output the same "Va-Ethannan, Deut 3:23 - 7:11" to the screen. If you place the following lines in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file you will see the date and the Torah reading displayed each time you boot up your computer: G2J T G2J TB | READINGS dBASE Interface (If you are a dbase programmer this will be useful. If not, just ignore it.) Two binary files J2GBIN.BIN and G2JBIN.BIN are also included. These can be LOADed and CALLed by a dBase program and are much faster than using the RUN command. They both require that a single date string be passed to it in the form MM/DD/YYYY. The converted date is returned in the same string variable. The variable MUST be padded to have a length of ten characters. A small demonstration is included to show the programmer how to use them. There are two additional files associated with the demo: JDB.PRG, JDB.DBF. Run JDB.PRG under dBASE III and study the code carefully to integrate the utilities into your application. SHAREWARE ========= There are two versions of the program in distribution. The evaluation version which operates only for the years 5750 (1990) to 5755 (1995) and the full version which operates for the years 5344 (1583) to 7000 (3239). If you have the evaluation version and want the full version or if you have obtained a free copy of the full version you should send the registration fee of $18 to the address below. Pennant Enterprises 25 Shadow Lane Great Neck, NY 11021 (516) 466-5509 Please send only US currency or checks drawn on US banks. Extra Incentive ! ================= In co-operation with JCS Marketing we are offering an additional incentive to register. Anyone who registers JCAL with us will receive a Bonus Registration Certificate which will entitle you to buy JCS's "Shareware Collection", a CD-ROM with hundreds of outstanding Shareware programs of every kind for $9.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling. This offer is good until June 30, 1994. You may send questions to Lester Penner at the same address or to Compuserve 75236,1572 or Prodigy TMDB08A . Enjoy, Les