Importing HMI interface screens and information

[Ga Bowen]

Our electric engineers create an Human Machine Interface (HMI) for all our production machinery. Basically a touch screen interface that can control an entire machine.

As you can imagine there are usually between 100 and 1000 screens. Each screen needs breaking down and an explanation put in the documentation.

At the moment it gets written in Word (or sometimes PowerPoint ) and then imported into H&M. There is a lot of formatting required and it also means I find it hard to keep links to screenshots.

Everyone is open to suggestions and different methods. What would people on here suggest as the best method of importing this sort of data into H+M?

Maybe extra H+M basic/floating licences? We'd need about an extra 5 seats.

[Tim Green]

Hi Gareth,

Are you just showing the screen with information below it or do you want hotspots in the image of the screen so that the use can click or tap on the elements for more information? Particularly if you are using hotspots it would make a lot of sense to do them directly in Help+Manual, which would eliminate a lot of unnecessary work with a lot of them.

A good way to do this would be to set up a style repository and store all your HMI pages there for reuse in multiple projects. Then the layout and formatting would be the same everywhere, because all the styles would also be shared, and all the linked projects could insert the pages as snippets wherever they are needed.

Maybe extra H+M basic/floating licences? We'd need about an extra 5 seats.

What you choose there depends on how many of your staff need to work at the same time. If all of them would be working at the same time and it is generally more economical for each to have their own Pro license. However, if you have a larger number of people who will be working on it in different locations and know what the maximum number who will probably be using HM at the same time, then Floating licenses are a good choice.

[Ga Bowen]

Thanks Tim.

About 1 in 10 projects require us to match the customer's style. Is that possible when still using the same repository?

While we're here, I've always thought HelpXplain would be superb for screen mapping and processes if

1/ you could link images
2/ you could reference individual pages to H+M.

[Tim Green]

About 1 in 10 projects require us to match the customer's style. Is that possible when still using the same repository?

That's a little tricky because you can only link a project to a single repository. What you could do would be to create separate projects for those customers that are either not linked to a repository and have the customer's styles defined in the project itself, or linked to a different repository with the customer's styles. Then instead of inserting the snippets "From Repository" you would use the "From File" option and link to the files in the /Topics folder of the main repository. That avoids having to maintain multiple copies of the same files.

While we're here, I've always thought HelpXplain would be superb for screen mapping and processes if

1/ you could link images
2/ you could reference individual pages to H+M.

Both of those are already possible. You can attach any links you like to any element in the Link & Interaction section in the Properties pane. If the Xplain is in a Help+Manual WebHelp you need to write the link like this:

Code: Select all

../index.html?introduction.htm

The topic extension may be .html instead of .htm if you have defined it that way in your HTML export options. The ../ prefix is necessary because the Xplain is in a sub-folder of the main WebHelp folder. You should also set "Top Window" or "New Window" as the target, otherwise it will open a copy of the WebHelp in the Xplain iFrame, which is not what you want.

[Ga Bowen]

Cheers, Tim. This is all looking pretty positive.

I've just been told this morning that they are looking at integrating the eWriter with the current software as it is Windows based.

We've potentially gone from print outs of Word and Powerpoint to a paperless, fully integrated, interactive help system in about two weeks.