Thorsten wrote:Using a general framework Richard has developed which in turn uses canvas routines, I find the work of generating all the screens merely tedious (positioning all items on-screen and linking them to properties is not very exciting work) but quite doable.
That is the MFD (=multi-function-display) code from the F15, right ?
I looked at it, it's using OOP to create a few abstraction layers for managing pages, items and for having a page controller.
Internally, most of this is mapped to "CanvasText" nodes (properties in the property tree), that are mapped to C++/OSG code using OSGText.
Originally, Tom came up with a few examples for the CDU use-case on airliners:
We were also hoping to generalize this functionality and come up with a Nasal-space framework for such scenarios, agnostic to certain aircraft/use-cases. But it seems that Richard's code has progressed much more in the meantime: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_MFD_Framework
So it would probably be good to update the wiki accordingly and add a link to the F15/SpaceShuttle code handling the MFD.
http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mai ... /34493581/
Thorsten wrote:I *think* what Jens is describing is just a global _framework_ to store these kinds of documents which then each plane would use, so that you don't have to copy files into every aircraft directory separately - it'd then still be up to the user to acquire the _content_ in a legal way and put it there.
Without myself being much into airliner operation, to me this sounds a very useful idea. I think the best path forward is to get in touch with a few airliner maintainers who have used this kind of thing already, talk to them about a good interface/standard and then go ahead and do it - once it runs for 2-3 demo cases, others are going to adopt it.
Actually, the whole EFB idea has also been discussed previously, with a focus on using Canvas and Nasal - analogous to how Richard's MFD framework is just a front-end on top of Canvas/Nasal. Obviously, this approach (it not using Phi), has the limitation that it can only display stuff inside the fgfs main window.
But we do have code/prototypes doing EFB handling using Nasal & Canvas:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_EFB_Framework
More recently, another idea is to add dedicated PDF support to the core Canvas system, so that arbitrary PDF files can be rendered onto a Canvas: viewtopic.php?f=71&t=27499&p=258282#p258282