When I did embedded touch screen menu systems in the past I always came up with a way to "design" the screens of the menus in a text capture method that was then translated to source code tables via a self written "menu compiler". If the screen under the touch screen was a character based design then this translated very well from a text type grid layout in the design collaterals. If I was doing this in a modern day time (its been about 10 years since I did a touch screen system design) I would consider hosting the source collateral in some Windows based GUI CAD program and then use a tool to export the "screens" to source code tables. One scheme that may work would be to use VISIO for the layout design and then use the embedded VBA language to build the compiler / export tool. Another scheme may be to use ACCESS as the design tool. The Access forms designer could be used to "design" the touch screen layouts and then the VBA in that can be programmed as the "menu compiler". The possible advantage of using the ACCESS tool is that it supports data base capability right there so that things like the string tables can be easily handled and extracted for translations to other languages. With careful design it can be possible to have the translator be trained to use the ACCESS tool to perform the translations so that they can see a reasonably accurate WYSIWYG type environment and judge whether the translated strings will fit the fields and buttons.

I have a potential project coming up where I may very well need to go through all this again and come up with a tool to use. :-) [In the past I've made a total of four (strike that - five) separate tool sets for doing this type of work, each very much customized to its specific working environment. The first one was way back in Z80 days with tools that ran under CP/M!! I do not even have any of the collateral for that one around any more :=( ].

Michael Karas