Documentation is a vital part of any project since we need to make presentations of our work on regular bases. Managers/Users who pay for your time will like to be kept informed and have a saying in what you do and this takes time, so lets attempt to automate it. Most engineers would love to just press a single button and have reporting/documentation done automatically. To do this we need to consider a few requirements for printing.
- Some developers will like to maintain documents/presentations manually, so to support those we need a capability to export diagrams and texts using standard copy & paste. They can then add these into their own documents through a clipboard.
- As I present diagrams I often go through PowerPoint and add some annotated content. We can do that in BSA directly and this will not require extra work due to the next point.
- Some users (like myself) would like to press a button and be done with doc/presentations by creating a PDF, print a doc or create web pages. And this is possible. Keep in mind that BSA already contain a very powerfully graphical editor that can act as a WYSIWYG page preview. The only thing we lack is (1) a capability to print a single diagram controlled, (2) a capability to include other diagrams within selected frames and the same with text. We can easily allow the user to create a document template that is populated as we generate/print the document – and most of the hard work is done already due to the graphics engine.
Displaying text is the easy one – we just extend our current text tool to display selected text from the repository on a diagram.
Displaying a sub-diagram should be more or less the same – we use a rectangle as base.
Setting page restrictions can be a variant of the existing Print Page tool.
Actually printing a diagram controlled will be some work – not sure as I will need to experiment a bit.
Adding a document template in Dictionary is straight forward.
As this will be a bit of work I like to leave the idea a bit while I consider alternatives and dig more into the details of printing. We also have the issue of including print support in user applications – which earlier was planned as a HMI Form.
Thanks for reading my Sunday ranting 🙂