A.1 Wishlist

It would be nice to have the following things in PP3. Please contact Torsten Bronger if you want to contribute.

• Very faint stars, i.e. stars fainter than faintest_star_disk_magnitude, should be removed from the map automatically, if they overlap with a label. It shouldn't matter whether the label was implicitly created or user-defined.
• An ephemerides module that allows to insert the Sun, the Moon, and the planets on the map, for a given date, time, and observation location on Earth. By the way, the C++ module itself is already existing, but its integration into PP3 is not done yet.
• More map projections, in particular a real isogonal one.
• The resolution of the Milky Way should be determined in a way that TeX's memory doesn't overflow. Maybe one should switch to contour plots instead of dot patterns for the Milky Way.
• Create little bitmaps of all labels in order to determine kerning parameters for them.
• PP3 should become able to deal with large data bases.
• The star names list of Celestia or something like that should be used for identifying stars in input scripts.

Besides that, I'd like to re-structure the internals of PP3 because in some respect the code is not well maintainable and expandable. For the long-term future it may be worth thinking about using Guile as the scripting language.