I've been working on pat on and off for years. It's never achieved its major design goal, which is to perform the basic functions of a paper atlas — physical and statistical mapping — in as portable a way as possible, and do it one better by being interactive.

But it's a lot of the way there, and its current functionality is useful enough that I am releasing an unfinished version.

The hope is that pat will be able to run on any computer and produce a map, even if it's something as simple as ASCII text. It's as portable and extensible as possible so that new operating systems, device drivers and projections can easily be added.