Create Configuration File

Create your own configuration file from samples below, you can save the sample “config.xml”, “export.xml” and “text.html”, then edit them in the text editer.

config.xml: parameters of output XML file.

<samplerate>: sample rate of the data file.

<rawout>: output raw data to filename.raw folder.

<begin>3: name of trial begin message. When this message appears, EyeMap starts recording user defined message events. Message happened before or after recording are global message, which can be accessed by every fixation in that trial. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to <cutbegin>.

<end>3: name of trial end message. When this message appears, EyeMap stops recording message events. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to <cutend>.

<cutbegin>3: name of recording start message. When this message appears, EyeMap starts recording fixation and saccade events. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to <begin>.

<cutend>3: name of recording end message. When this message appears, EyeMap stops recording fixation and saccade events. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to <end>.

<cut>2: define messages, which cut a fixation into two.

<msg>1: name of user defined messages. (user can define multiple <msg> in one config.xml file, and msg are reference in variable MSGnXXX, where n is its order in config.xml file)

<forwardInt>: define a forward-count interval.

<backwardInt>: define a backward-count interval.

1. Supported by EyeMap from version 0.0.9a.
2. Not supported by EyeMap so far.
3. A config.xml must have at least one <begin>/<cutbegin> tag and one <end>/<cutend> tag. In the old version, <begin> and <cutbegin> tags were the same, which indicate a message that starts a trial; <end> and <cutend> tags were the same, which indicate a message that ends a trial. The new function was supported by EyeMap from version 0.2b_r7.

text.html: define background text for each trial.

0. Important: When you create text.html for text materials with proportional font type, you need check the letter spacing property of your stimulus text.

1. Items in <style> body

color: font color.

font-family: font name.

font-size: font size in px (Density-independent Pixels, default) or pt (Points - 1/72 of an inch based on the physical size of the screen) [px * 0.75 = pt ]
example: 15pt = 20px = 20

leading: amount of vertical space (called leading) between lines in dip.

letter-spacing0: control the inter character distance in dip space.

<texttype>: if the text is unicode or not. DEPRECATED FROM Ver 0.0.9a_r3

2. Tags in html <head> section

<alphabet>1: alphabet of current language, includes all capital letters. (For non-English languages, create a alphabet can help EyeMap determine the non-letter characters, and extract the word from punctuation further. For non-alphabetic writing systems such as Chinese, set alphabet to "unicode")
example: <alphabet>ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ</alphabet>

<number>1: numbers in current language.
example: <number>0123456789</number>

<sentstop>1: sentence stop punctuations, such as ".", "!", "?" and etc in English. Sentence stop punctuations can help EyeMap extract sentences for different languages.
example: <sentstop>.!?</sentstop>

<align>: the way of software aligns background text supported modes: center/left/right. (left is the default value)

<x>: In the center align mode, it means x position of the screen center. In the left/right align mode, it means x position of background text block to the left/right of the screen.

<y>: In the left/right align mode, it means y starting position of text block in the screen. In the center align mode, it means y position of the screen center.

<screenX>2: The width of the experiment presenting screen. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to 1024.

<screenY>2: The height of the experiment presenting screen. If the tag is not specified, its value equals to 768.

<AoIYFactor>: Defines the vspace of Area of Interest, and vspace = AoI height*AoIYFactor.

3. Tags in html <body> section

<p>: <p> (outer <p> tags) tags are placed inside <body>, each tag represent the background text string for one trial. (If slash “/” appeared in the text, it means that current text using slash as separator instead of space). DEPRECATED FROM Ver 0.1.0b_r3

2To display rich text layout (html mode) for current trial, embed inner <p> tags inside <p>. And following tags are supported by EM so far: (Note: inner <p> tags cannot be nested, and multiple spaces in html text will be collapse, use &#160; to represent the non-breaking spaces. )

3To segment text in different ways, outer <p> tags support sep variable.
example: <p sep=';'>he;llo; world<p> (the sentence "hello world" is separated by separator ; into 3 parts, which is 'he', 'llo', and ' world')
sep variable can assign to any char, except '\' and '/'.

Table. Supported Html tags

Tag Description
Anchor tag

The <a> tag creates a hypertext link and supports the following attributes:

  • target: Specifies the name of the target window where you load the page. Options include _self, _blank, _parent, and _top. The _self option specifies the current frame in the current window, _blank specifies a new window, _parent specifies the parent of the current frame, and _top specifies the top-level frame in the current window. 
  • href: Specifies a URL. The URL can be either absolute or relative to the location of the SWF file that is loading the page. An example of an absolute reference to a URL ishttp://www.adobe.com; an example of a relative reference is /index.html. Absolute URLs must be prefixed with http://; otherwise, Flash treats them as relative URLs. 
Bold tag

The <b> tag renders text as bold. A bold typeface must be available for the font used.
Break tag

The <br/> tag creates a line break in the text.
Font tag

The <font> tag specifies a font or list of fonts to display the text.The font tag supports the following attributes:

  • color: Only hexadecimal color (#FFFFFF) values are supported.
  • face: Specifies the name of the font to use. As shown in the following example, you can specify a list of comma-delimited font names, in which case Flash Player selects the first available font. If the specified font is not installed on the local computer system or isn't embedded in the SWF file, Flash Player selects a substitute font.
  • size: Specifies the size of the font. You can use absolute pixel sizes, such as 16 or 18 or relative point sizes, such as +2 or -4.
  • letterspacing0: Specifies the tracking (manual kerning) in pixels to be applied to the right of each character.
  • kerning: Specifies whether kerning is enabled or disabled. A non-zero value enables kerning, while zero disables it.
Image tag

The <img> tag lets you embed external image files (JPEG, GIF, PNG), SWF files, and movie clips inside text.

The <img> tag supports the following attributes:

  • src4: Specifies the URL to an image or SWF file, or the linkage identifier for a movie clip symbol in the library. This attribute is required; all other attributes are optional. External files (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and SWF files) do not show until they are downloaded completely.
  • width: The width of the image, SWF file, or movie clip being inserted, in pixels.
  • height: The height of the image, SWF file, or movie clip being inserted, in pixels.

Note: The following attributes are not supported: 
align, hspace, vspace, id, and checkPolicyFile.
Italic tag  

The <i> tag displays the tagged text in italics. An italic typeface must be available for the font used.
Paragraph tag

The <p> tag creates a new paragraph. The <p> tag supports the following attributes:

  • align: Specifies alignment of text within the paragraph; valid values are left, right, justify, and center.
  • class: Specifies a class name that can be used for styling.
Span tag

The <span> tag supports the following attributes:

  • class: Specifies a class name that can be used for styling.
Text format tag

The <textformat> tag lets you use a subset of paragraph formatting line leading, indentation, margins, and tab stops. You can combine <textformat> tags with the built-in HTML tags.

The <textformat> tag has the following attributes:

  • indent: Specifies the indentation from the left margin to the first character in the paragraph. Both positive and negative numbers are acceptable.
  • blockindent: Specifies the indentation applied to all lines of the paragraph.
  • leftmargin: Specifies the left margin of the paragraph, in points;
  • rightmargin: Specifies the right margin of the paragraph, in points;
  • leading: Specifies the leading (line height) measured in pixels between a line's ascent and the previous line's descent;
  • tabstops: Specifies a comma-separated list of tab stop positions for the paragraph.
Underline tag

The underline <u> tag underlines the tagged text.

1. Supported by EyeMap from version 0.0.9a_r3
2. Supported by EyeMap from version 0.1.0b_r3
3. Supported by EyeMap from version 0.1.0b_r6
 4. URL address must be absolute path for EyeMap version from 0.1.0b_r3 to 0.4b_r3, URL address must be relative path since EyeMap version 0.4b_r4

export.xml: define export variable filters, variables and variable output order.

sample:
<export>
<filter eye="eye" name="name" operator="operator" value="value">Filter</filter>
<vars eye="eye">name</vars>
……
</export>

eye: eye of attached variable.

name: name of variable.

operator: operator (=, <, >, <=, >= and <>) that used for comparing filter threshold value to actual variable value.

value: filter threshold value.