SkinForge - Next generation Enigma2 skin design

SkinForge is a skin design kit that encompasses

• a hierarchical building block concept with
  • shared building blocks (buttons, title bars, lists, screen parts, ...) that live in one place and are reused by all your plugins
  • relative positioning of building blocks
  • global variables
• an offline skin compiler that lets you write skins in a richer, hierarchical language and compiles them down to the plain, flat XML enigma2 actually loads
• ZAML/YAML high level skin defintion language plus converters to translate it to/from XML

Language levels

0. XML: the flat XML enigma2 itself understands; nothing to compile.
1. XML+: hierarchical XML with includes, variables, relative positioning and compile-time color/formula checking (xmlcompile).
2. YAML: a readable YAML dialect (skin.yml / *.ymlinc) that round-trips to and from XML+ (ymlcompile).
3. ZAML (Zenith Advanced Markup Language): YAML plus a for loop for repeated blocks (zmlcompile).

flowchart TD
    ZML[".zml / .zmlinc<br/>ZAML source"] -->|zml2ymldomain| YML
    YML[".yml / .ymlinc<br/>YAML source"] -->|"yml2xmldomain (.yml only)"| XMLP
    YML -.->|"on demand, temp .xmlinc"| FLAT
    HAND["hand-written XML+"] -.-> XMLP
    XMLP[".xml / .xmlinc<br/>XML+ source"] -->|"xmlprettydomain, then xmlinc"| FLAT
    COMMON[("Common/<br/>shared building blocks")] -.->|resolved by xmlinc| FLAT
    FLAT["flat XML<br/>compiled, unformatted"] -->|xmlpretty| FINAL(["skin.xml<br/>what enigma2 loads"])

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Quick start

Clone the repo and add the git dir to the PATH variable:

git clone git@github.com:OpenCockpit/SkinForge.git

Then compile a plugin's skin, where <domain> is the plugin's directory name:

zmlcompile <domain> [srcbase] [dstbase] [cmnbase]

Documentation

The full documentation is in the SkinForge wiki:

• Getting started
• ZAML & YAML skin example
• Authoring in YAML
• Authoring in ZAML
• The XML+ compiler
• Other tools

Wiki

• https://github.com/xcentaurix/SkinForge/wiki