User manual on the Touchpanel

NMarkRoberts
NMarkRoberts Junior Member
in AMX General Discussion
I'd like to present help text / user manual (UM) information (text and pix) on a G3 touchpanel, and I'd appreciate some ideas on how to do it. This is for a project with dozens of controllers all doing the same thing, and I expect it to be continuously maintained for years to come.

I could just hard-code all of the information, but TPD3 isn't quite as good at authoring a manual as (eg) MS Word. I'd like to be able to create my manual, automagically ftp to it to the controllers, and perhaps have the controller code suck it up into the touchpanels.

Most of my touchpanels will in fact be browsers on PCs, so I could author the material in html, ftp that to the controller, and link to it from the touchpanel.

Does anyone know how to create the link for the browser to follow?

Alternatively, I could make a popup filled with an array of text buttons (the limit for text to be sent to a button is 128 bytes) and write the text for each UM page to it as the user navigates from one UM page to the next. I could make multiple generic popups with slots for one, two or three bitmaps as required by the text.
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  • yuri
    yuri Junior Member
    i would make an HTML based manual. Just make a nice index.html for your frame with two links on it. One for the actual control, and one for the html help.
    If you are limited to a manual on the touchpanel, i would use bitmaps instead of text...
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  • NMarkRoberts
    NMarkRoberts Junior Member
    Thanks

    Thanks Yuri, both good thoughts, I'd really like to have context-sensitive help which can be reached from anywhere within the panel itself, I'm sure it's easy to do if only one knows how.
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  • yuri
    yuri Junior Member
    what type of panel do you have btw? I have seen user manuals on 10 inch panels, and that works fine, but i can imagine using a manual on a 4 inch would be much harder...
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  • NMarkRoberts
    NMarkRoberts Junior Member
    Most of the touchpanels will be browser panels on laptops. I've found that 1024x768 panels never fit onto 1024x768 screens but you can fudge it by

    - Launching IE chromeless, for which I have a custom launcher, but you still get the RHS vertical slider

    - Modifying the html to be a little smaller after "saving as" and before ftping: width="1003" height="744"

    Either that or go to 800x600
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  • yuri
    yuri Junior Member
    then i would with .html manuals ;)
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