From Version 2.0, there is an amazingly simple way to create customized tutorials. It is important to understand that these are not the same type of tutorials you run from the Help menu, but rather a new simplified way of creating tutorials.
You need to know only two commands to make these tutorials.
$Title sets the title of the tutorial.
$TutorialLine describes each step in the tutorial.
Here is an example tutorial to show you how these commands can be used. You start by setting the title for the tutorial and then, at each place in the program where you want to explain something, you add a $TutorialLine with explaining text.
$Title "Demonstration Tutorial"
$TutorialLine "We start the program by selecting a workpiece from the built-in workpieces in CNC Simulator Pro. We do this by using the command $AddEmbeddedRegPart followed by the workpiece index and the location of the workpiece on the machine table."
$AddEmbeddedRegPart 1 20 20
$TutorialLine "Then we select a tool as well. We use M06 to execute the actual tool change. ET stands for Embedded Tool. In a real machine, you would write only T."
ET1 M06
$TutorialLine "Now let us add a few blocks to position the tool and feed down in Z. We also move the program zero point to the lower-left corner of the workpiece."
G92 X20 Y20 Z30
G00 X0 Y0 Z2
G01 Z-10 F200 S2500 M03
$TutorialLine "OK, let us now follow the outer contour of the workpiece."
Y160
X140
Y0
X0
$TutorialLine "As you could see, we did not need to put G01 on each line as it stays in memory (it is modal)."
$TutorialLine "We end the program with M30"
M30
Now to the magic. There are two ways to use a tutorial written in this manner. One way is for the student to simulate the tutorial, just like a normal CNC program. At each $TutorialLine, the simulator will pause and display a popup.
The student clicks the play button for each step to continue.
The second way this type of tutorial script can be used is by clicking "Create DocX tutorial" in the Help menu.
The program will simulate just as when a student clicks the play button, but this time a camera button will be visible on the screen.
Each time you want to document a step with a picture, you line up the shot (zoom, pan, rotate) and click the button. Then you click Play, to continue to step through the exercise.
When you are done, an exercise document will be created for you in the DocX MS Word compatible format.
A nice formatted document with all text, titles, and pictures will be ready to use. You can further edit the document in Word (or other DocX compatible software) and add questions and similar. Maybe for a test or for print-out learning material as PDFs. The sky is the limit!
Here we show the first two pages of the created document.
