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A sample page of the Bowditch Plus! Navigation Glossary can be seen here at
Note that the Glossary and the Bowditch text are fully indexed and can be searched for words or phrases, or even more sophisticated searches. But you will need the latest version of Acrobat Reader to execute these multi-document searches. The correct version will have the 4 icons to the right of the binoculars shown in the tool bar below. Earlier versions do not have this functionality and the icons are missing.
If you do not have the right version now, no problem. You can install a copy from the Bowditch Plus! CD. It is all there. Note that there is no searching available on these demo samples.
The value of full electronic searching...
A recent example illustrates the point. A friend was preparing to ship an old flat-card compass to a vessel in Chile from the Pacific Northwest. It occurred to us that we better check the compass dip angle here and there since the card may be balanced for the NW and not work in the Southern Hemisphere. Bowditch (the hard copy) was sitting on the table. We found "dip" in the printed index, but not the kind of dip we wanted, only celestial dip, ie dip of the horizon, and dip short of the horizon.
I was surprised, but I knew compass dip was there, somewhere, so we banged open Bowditch Plus! on the computer and did a search on "dip" and this way found the links to all the uses of the word "dip." We could click to go to the one we wanted, then view the page thumbnails and go straight to the graphic map of compass dip angles that we wanted.
Likewise, there are many meanings to the word "cable" in navigation. Our electronic index will find all of them in Bowditch, but the paper index in the book itself does not.
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