The Digital Vineyard Site Atlas of Hesse is an application based on Web technology. To be able to use the application, you will require a recent so-called HTML browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera. In order to visualize the texts and the high-resolution map print files you must install Adobe Acrobat-Reader from Version 5.0 upwards.
The minimum recommended monitor resolution is 800x600 pixel. Better results are achieved with a resolution of 1024x768 Pixel or higher. In order to use the application you must activate Java-Script in your browser. The pop-up blocker of your browser must be de-activated to view the map legend pop-up windows.
The application contains different menu levels. Immediately below the title bar you will find the main menu, which enables you to access the global information of the Vineyard Site Atlas (Start - Contents - Preface - etc.). The left menu enables you to select the topics. Starting the application automatically calls up the category Thematic Maps, the central part of the application. Click onto the black arrow in the red box or “Contents” in the main menu to call up the global topics menu. Go to the category Thematic Maps to return to the thematic maps of the Vineyard Site Atlas. The category Texts contains the explanatory text for the maps as well as global texts of the Vineyard Site Atlas. These texts are identical to those of the german print version published in the Geologischen Abhandlungen Hessen, Volume 114. The category Maps & Texts (1967) contains Volume 50 published in 1967 (1. Edition).
You can navigate the Vineyard Site Atlas either by topic or spatially. Select a topic from the category Thematic Maps in the menu bar, to automatically call up a second horizontal menu for choosing the region (Overview, Rheingau, Maingau, Bergstrasse, Gross-Umstadt). This menu also allows you to call up the legend and the relevant text of the Vineyard Site Atlas. Click a specific region in the map overview or the menu to present the appropriate region. Click the map once more to view the relevant locality. The final scale of the presentation is 1:25.000. However, the final scale will vary according to the monitor resolution settings.
Once you have arrived at the detail view by clicking a specific locality in a region, you can navigate in all directions indicated by a red arrow. The current position is indicated in the overview map in the upper left corner.
You can change topics in the detail view as well as overview without changing the view section. You can call up the relevant legend by selecting Legend in Menu 2. Pointing the cursor to a vineyard denomination in Internet-Explorer will call up a window containing the relevant data of the site. Some Brouwsers display this information in the status bar. Left-clicking the vineyard denomination will call up the appropriate legend containing the statistic data of the local collective vineyard.
The second menu also allows you to select the appropriate texts related to the active topic. This opens a new browser window in which the relevant text is displayed in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
In addition to viewing thematic maps in the Map Info System of the Vineyard Site Atlas, the application also allows you create high quality prints of the maps for your own use. In order to do this, please select Print files in the category Content of the main menu. This contains every map available for each topic and region (legends in german language). Each map can be viewed and then printed on appropriate printers.