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Posted: Thursday, October 18, 2007
Animated symbols for PAC Display 8
I work as an illustrator here and once or twice a month I have the pleasure of presenting to our training class a
PAC Display demo that I created. The demonstration is primarily a photogenic HMI for print and on-screen marketing, and therefore it uses a lot of JPEG graphics. JPEGs, which are bitmapped graphics, were the best solution for the appearance I wanted within the time I had. Since then, I’ve been asked to get the same animation capabilities into the hands of our PAC Display developers.
I’ve created a new demonstration using the Built-in Symbol feature of PAC Display. Built-in Symbols are graphics created in PAC Display and exported to PAC Display’s SMB format. These are not to be confused with the Symbol Factory that we also provide with PAC Display. Symbol Factory is a library of images, whereas, built-in symbols are ones you create. The latter has the advantage of retaining the graphic dynamic attributes that animate them.
I created some gauges, pumps, and a mixer that now exist as ready-to-use symbols for PAC Display Basic version 8.0c or higher. Anyone can import one of these symbols and do a find and replace on the variable behind its graphic dynamic attributes. Because the graphics use the WMF format, instead of JPEG, they can be placed over any background. Though the WMF format has some image quality loss compared to JPEGs, this is mitigated by the flexibility of a transparent background.
You can download the complete PAC Display animation demo or just the Built-in Symbols. The complete demo includes the PAC Control strategy built to run on our PAC Simulator, the PAC Display project with the animation all ready to view in Runtime, and the built-in symbols. You will also need the PAC Simulator, if you do not have a SNAP PAC controller. All samples work with PAC Project Basic which is free.
Also available is a Opto 22 HMI Visio stencil library, which contains the graphics used to create the demo. You cannot edit these graphics in Visio, but you can embellish them (for example, placing rotated text on the face of a round gauge) and then drag the object or objects into PAC Display. (Note: to preserve the transparent background, you must drag and drop from Visio or Save As from Visio to WMF format and import WMF into PAC Display.)
John Garrett
Posted by jgarrett at October 18, 2007 9:21 AM
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