2015-01-23, 12:47
I've made some more experiments with instruction building programs. I wanted to investigate into JavaFX, it's a promising platform with many useful features: css support, a powerful scenegraph, effects, a great look, etc.
I've come up with a small prototype, where a pre rendered model is layed out on a page. Items are organized into a tree of "boxes": the assembly box is inside the step box (along with the part list and number), the step box is inside the page box etc.
The program lets you move boxes around and support some basic snapping.
I've tested this mechanism becouse i'm not a fan of LPub relative positioning of things (if i'm not wrong, in a step in LPUB, things are placed around the "assembly image", with the ability to choose which corner or side).
My approach gives more freedom, but is also more time consuming becouse things must be manually corrected (for example if you reduce the height of a step, you have to manually bring up all the following steps).
I'm not really sure my approach is better, expecially after you put in callouts or column subdivision etc. to complicate things. Maybe a solution could be to add buttons to programmatically organize a page into a particular layout (single column, double column for example), that do the big work, letting the user redefine small details. Or buttons like "compact steps" etc. It doesn't seems like the best solution anyway.
What do you guys think?
You can download the program here. It needs Java 8, can be launched with java -jar testbi.jar
Here's a screenshot, of course it's just a prototype, i've just placed buttons around to test some functionalities. Zooming and rendering already work, as the togglable design borders.
![[Image: JDRGMm4.png]](http://i.imgur.com/JDRGMm4.png)
Here's a sample output:
![[Image: xwnBIcS.png]](http://i.imgur.com/xwnBIcS.png)
I've come up with a small prototype, where a pre rendered model is layed out on a page. Items are organized into a tree of "boxes": the assembly box is inside the step box (along with the part list and number), the step box is inside the page box etc.
The program lets you move boxes around and support some basic snapping.
I've tested this mechanism becouse i'm not a fan of LPub relative positioning of things (if i'm not wrong, in a step in LPUB, things are placed around the "assembly image", with the ability to choose which corner or side).
My approach gives more freedom, but is also more time consuming becouse things must be manually corrected (for example if you reduce the height of a step, you have to manually bring up all the following steps).
I'm not really sure my approach is better, expecially after you put in callouts or column subdivision etc. to complicate things. Maybe a solution could be to add buttons to programmatically organize a page into a particular layout (single column, double column for example), that do the big work, letting the user redefine small details. Or buttons like "compact steps" etc. It doesn't seems like the best solution anyway.
What do you guys think?
You can download the program here. It needs Java 8, can be launched with java -jar testbi.jar
Here's a screenshot, of course it's just a prototype, i've just placed buttons around to test some functionalities. Zooming and rendering already work, as the togglable design borders.
Here's a sample output:
