Page description language
Use the SDC Screen Editor to edit pages if you have a WIFI connection configured. The information in this section is mostly targeted around users who will edit the the configuration manually. You will still find the documentation about gauge properties useful though, even when using the screen editor.
SDC’s Page Description Language (PDL) is a fairly basic XML file structure that enables you to define the set of pages you want to display, and the layout of each page. This covers the size and location of all gauges you want, any warning or other composites (e.g. speed camera warning), and static text to be shown. The full set of gauges available are described in the various sub-sections below.
Page File Structure
The page file is stored as a name of your choice, and the name itself is specified in the application ini file. This means you can have more than one set of page definitions on the disk so that, for example, you can try out some changes to a copy of your page file without editing the working one. It is not possible to change page files while the system is running - you must reboot the device for the chosen pageset to be loaded - but multiple pages can be included in one pageset (license allowing), with switching between them supported using various input methods such as touchscreen, rotary encoder, or CANBus message (license allowing).
The page file consists of the following sections:
- The ‘always’ page. This is a page that is always drawn, no matter which page is selected. Page zero in the page list is used for this purpose. You can use this if, for example, you want to implement a menu button, or you want to put a logo somewhere on every page.
- A subsequent list of pages, starting from page one. Each page has a page number and a name, followed by a list of gauges and their attributes.
- Some settings sections, which allow you to define some colour information to make gauge colour assignment a bit easier, and some other default values that can be used in scripts associated with gauges.
The page file is an xml format file. It can be opened in a text editor but the SDC Tools Screen Editor is the best way to change it. The following sections provide details about each of the gauge types and their properties.