The Map pane visualizes the selected ship's journey in the form of position markers and route lines.
The Map pane is the heart of Journey Plotter and therefore cannot be closed.

Journey Plotter has many settings to change its appearance. This manual assumes the default settings are used.

Markers and lines

Markers are shown to indicate noon positions.
markers indicate the start of journey, followed by to indicate subsequent positions. markers indicate a stationary position, i.e. two or more consecutive dates have the same position.
A square marker, for example , indicates an estimated position, used for dates without a valid noon position.
Though this estimated position is unlikely the correct position, it does give a reasonable indication where the ship was.
Hovering the mouse over a marker will display a tooltip that gives the date and position of the marker, where estimated position markers show [est.] after the position to emphasise the position is calculated, not read from the ship's data.
Click on a marker to select the date.

The markers are connected by route lines. Dashed bridging lines are used to indicate that no noon positions are available in between two dates with noon positions.
With the exception of estimated noon positions, bridging lines aren't shown by default. See the Options section to activate them.

The currently selected date is indicated by a blue ship icon, provided the date has a noon position.
If the same date exists more than once in the log-books, the additional locations are shown by a yellow ship icon.
This image shows an example of duplicate days. In this example the ship has passed the date line from west to east, and thus the date hasn’t changed.

A legend is shown in the bottom-right corner explaining the markers and lines being displayed.
Below the legend the latitude and longitude position of the mouse cursor is shown.

A message is displayed at the top of the map if date filtering is active.
See Date Filter Pane for more information about date filtering.

Zoom and pan

There are two ways to zoom and pan the map; using the mouse, or using the zoom and pan control in the top-left corner.

Panning using the mouse is done by dragging the map with the left button.
Zooming is done by using the scroll-wheel, or by double-clicking using the left button to zoom in, or the right button to zoom out.

It's also possible to zoom in on an area by drawing a selection box. Hold the Shift key and draw the selection box by dragging the mouse whilst holding down the right mouse button. Upon release of the right mouse button the map will zoom in to the selected area.
If you draw the selection box without holding down the Shift key, you can choose Zoom To Selection from the View menu.
If the selection box is no longer needed, click the right mouse button to remove it.

Alternatively, use the zoom and pan controls in the top left corner.
Click on one of the direction arrows to pan the map in the selected direction.
Zoom in or out using the + or - buttons. When hovering over these buttons, a bar will be shown indicating the current zoom factor. Click on the bar to go directly to a certain zoom factor.

The scale bar in the bottom-left corner indicates the scale of the map in kilometres and nautical miles.

Click the left-down pointing arrow to maximize the map pane. All other open panes will be closed temporarily allowing the map to take up all available space. When the map is maximized the arrow will change to a top-right pointing arrow. Click it to restore the original layout.
Another way to maximize and restore the map pane is by using the Maximize Map menu item from the View menu.

Date toolbar

The date toolbar is used to navigate between available dates, or to animate the journey by automatically stepping through the dates sequentially using the set animation update interval.

From left to right, use the buttons to: Go to the first available date.Go to the previous date. Currently selected date. Click to show a calendar to select a different date (see Calendar section below). Go to the next date.Go to the last available date. Animate the journey backwards in time from noon of the currently selected date. Animate the journey forwards in time from noon of the currently selected date. Decrease the animation speed.Animation speed (label).Increase the animation speed.

When a journey is animated, most toolbar buttons are disabled, the animate button changes to a stop button and the date selection button includes the time of day.

Stop animation and move ship icon to noon position of active day.

Consult the Options section for instructions on changing the way that the route is displayed during animation. It's possible to hide future positions and to truncate the trailing route.
The Videos and Screenshots page shows two examples of animations.

Calendar

When the date button is clicked, a calendar is shown from which a date can be selected.

As shown in the image above, the calendar uses visual indicators for days without information, days without position, and duplicate days.
Underlined dates have no information available, i.e. the date isn't included in the log-books.
Red dates have no valid noon position.
Orange dates indicate multiple log-book entries with the same date.

Click on a date to move the ship icon to that date and display the information from the log-books.
Use the left or right arrows in the calendar header to change the displayed month, or click on the month and select a month from the menu that will be shown. Click on the year to select a year from the menu.