To use BOY, your CSS product needs to include the org.csstudio.opibuilder.* plugins and their dependencies. The converter plugins described in the section called “Converters” are optional.

You should prepare the following files for your site and place them in a location that is accessible by all users.

The definition of color and font macros allows you to create uniform display files. By using a macro Background for the display background color and a macro Title for the font of a title label your display files will appear consistent. In addition, you can later adjust colors and fonts by simply updating the definition file instead of having to edit each individual display.

You can start with the files that are included in the BOY examples, i.e. /BOY Examples/color.def and /BOY Examples/font.def, but copying them into a location is accessible by all CSS installations at your site.

The files could be in a network file system location, but since the detailed path name syntax for such shared file system location often differs between operating systems, a web location might be more practical. BOY can read files from http://, https:// and ftp:// URLs.

Note that the fonts listed in the font definition file need to be fonts that are actually available on the computer that executes CSS, but available fonts differ between operating systems. The font definition file allows you to specify different values depending on the operating system, for example

// Title Font for Linux GTK 
Title(linux_gtk) = Sans-bold-18
// Title Font for MacOS
Title(macosx) = Lucida Grande-bold-18

A practical solution for display files that need to look the same across platforms can be the use of Microsoft Office fonts. Windows and Mac OS X computers that have Microsoft Office installed already provide these fonts, and they are also available for Linux, see http://corefonts.sourceforge.net. But even with same fonts installed there can be slight differences. For example, the OS X version of Microsoft Office fonts seem to use a different size, for which you can compensate in the font definition file by using OS-specific settings:

// Title Font for Windows and Linux
Default=Verdana-regular-10
Default(linux_gtk)=Verdana-regular-10
// OS X needs different size to get same look
Default(macosx_cocoa)=Verdana-regular-14

The Scheme file allows you to define the defaults for widget properties in newly created OPI files. For example, you can use a schema file to use macro names for the default fonts and colors of widgets.

The default for the Top OPIs will point to the BOY example files like /BOY Examples/main.opi. You probably want to adjust them to load certain top-level OPI files of your site, like http://my_opi_server/opis/start_screen.opi

By including Eclipse “Team” support like the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) or support for another version system, you can keep your OPI files in a software repository, then check them out into the CSS workspace, edit them there, and commit changes back to the repository.

The plugin org.csstudio.opibuilder.converter can convert *edl displays of the EPICS Extensible Display Manager (EDM) to the BOY *.opi file format, and org.csstudio.opibuilder.adl2boy performs this for *.adl displays of MEDM.

Such conversions are naturally limited because a converter can only attempt a basic translation of for example rectangles in an EDM display into rectangles in a BOY display. It cannot tell if the rectangles in the EDM display were meant to create a visual group of widgets that are better transformed into a Grouping Container widget in BOY.