When opened Journey Plotter automatically downloads the available vessels, listing them in the Ship Selection Pane.
The number of available ships for each period is reported in the status bar.

To plot the journey of a vessel and read the daily activities, select a ship from the Ship Selection Pane.
Search for a ship by scrolling through the list of ships, or by typing its name, or part thereof.
The list can also be filtered by ship services.
When ships consist of multiple parts, the available periods are shown as a bulleted list. These periods can be individually excluded.

When all the information for the selected vessel is available, information about the editor and the ship is shown and its journey will be shown on the map.

By default the journey is indicated by a red line with noon position markers.
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.
Square markers, for example , indicate estimated positions, used for dates without a valid noon position.

Use the zoom and pan controls in the top left corner, or use your mouse to pan and zoom the map.
When hovering over the + or - buttons, a bar will be shown indicating the current zoom factor. Click on the bar to go directly to a certain zoom factor.

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.

The Description Pane shows the description of the ship and information about the log-books.
If available, the ship's activities will be shown in the Information Pane.

The Date button in the map toolbar will show a calendar which can be used to select a single date.
Underlined dates indicate there's no information available for that date.
Red dates indicate there's no valid position available for that date.
Duplicate dates are shown in yellow to indicate multiple log-book entries with the same date have been detected.

The arrow buttons can be used to navigate between the dates.
To animate through the dates, click the Play button.

If the selected date has a valid position, the position is indicated by a blue ship marker on the map.
A yellow ship marker indicates a duplicate date.

To filter by dates, set the desired first and last date in the Date Filter Pane and click the Select button.
Use the Reset button to reset the first and last date to first and last available dates from the log-books.

Check the Environment section for a more detailed description of the various environment sections.