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gzotti merged 4 commits into from
Dec 28, 2025
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SUG: foreword for 25.4 #4700

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SUG: foreword for 25.4
gzotti Dec 21, 2025
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Update ch_foreword.tex
gzotti Dec 22, 2025
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gzotti Dec 24, 2025
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gzotti Dec 28, 2025
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31 changes: 30 additions & 1 deletion guide/ch_foreword.tex
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Expand Up @@ -76,7 +76,7 @@ \chapter*{Foreword for Stellarium 25.2}

\vspace{2\baselineskip}

\section*{\ldots and on to V25.3}
\section*{\ldots and on to V25.3\ldots}
Over the summer we have further refined many details around skycultures.
Contributors have provided and updated many details especially in Arab, Chinese and even Mesopotamian skycultures.
Don't imagine, just see Cuneiform labels in the sky!
Expand All @@ -91,6 +91,35 @@ \section*{\ldots and on to V25.3}
Georg Zotti and Alexander Wolf, September 2025
\end{flushright}

\vspace{2\baselineskip}

\section*{\ldots and V25.4}
Our refinements around skycultures continued. Our skyculture researcher, Susanne M. Hoffmann, and her international peers and students
have created no less than 4 new skycultures and refined several more.
One is a remarkable Chinese adaptation of the standard IAU constellations which replaces the internationally known constellations by
characters from the \emph{Journey to the West}, a well-known story from classical Chinese literature. While we cannot provide the whole story
and surely all of us not familiar with the story will miss a lot, the cute artwork alone, together with the standard names available in the ``Byname'' labels,
may bring a fresh view to the old figures.

Some time ago, a user asked why our speech output was so bad. To be honest, I was not even aware of the current
state of operating system support to output audibly whatever text is shown in the user interface.
But indeed there are places where speech output may be helpful even for users without visibility problems.
When you have selected a constellation, you may now hear whatever the skyculture author had to say about it.
Spoken Information is also available for stars, planets and deep-sky objects.
Also the introductory sections of skycultures, and landscape descriptions can be read out.
Of course this needs texts translated to your user language, so our thanks again go to our team of translators,
we know the amount of text in the sky cultures is quite a challenge. It also needs support of your language by the
speech engines, this is out of our hands.
Some details may still sound a bit rough, we are also still learning here, so further improvements are likely.
And: If you are expert in the field of accessibility and want to redesign and extend this to become fully functional, we welcome your support!

You may also see this User Guide has fewer pages than the last. We have slightly redesigned the appearance and reduced font size, but the actual content has again grown.

Clear skies!

\begin{flushright}
Georg Zotti and Alexander Wolf, December 2025
\end{flushright}


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