NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2014 Jul 12, 07:31 -0700
Hanno,
I have generated a set of flat Bygrave scales with the same markings as the Mark IIA Bygrave copy in the file BygraveMkIIA.pdf at https://NavList.net/m2.aspx/Postscript-code-for-making-Bygrave-Scales-Stuart-mar-2014-g27398 . I have adjusted it to fit on A3 (297mm x 420mm) paper. Please let me know what think and suggest any tweaks or adjustments that you think might improve usability (thicker scale ticks, fewer cycles, larger font, scale colours etc.). All these are easily adjustable through input parameters in the code.
You indicated offlist that you were using a beam compass for your flat Bygrave calculations. I assume then that you are not printing the cosine scale on transparent material but are transfering distances back and forth between cotangent and cosine scales with that device. I had done a similar thing using dividers. The disadvantage there is that you have to keep track of the the number of cycles in vertival direction between numbers. A beam compass seems or similar device seems like an ideal solution. One just needs to keep the beam parallel to the scales and adjust the pointers to the required numbers. Is that you are doing? If so do the pointers have enough range in the direction perpendicular to the beam to be able to perform all calculations and what brand of beam compass are you using?
Regards,
Robin