JMRI: Displaying Panel File Contents
To load a Panel previously saved to disk in JMRI
and have the program display it, use the "Open Panel..." item from the Panels
menu.
In contrast, this pages describes how to show the contents
of the file itself, meaning the data used to draw
the Panel, either on screen or on paper.
JMRI panel and configuration information is stored in XML files. These are text files that people can directly read, but the format and structure information take a lot of space.
JMRI provides a tool, called an "XSLT transform", to convert the JMRI panel file into a more readable web page. You open your panel file with a web browser, and can then read it, print it, copy and paste into a file of another form, etc.

A large example of this is available as a PDF file. This is the configuration information, including routes, Logix, etc, for the SP Shasta Route layout.
To view your own panel file, the easiest approach is to view it via JMRI's web server which knows how to find all the needed formating files automatically. The steps are:
- Start the JMRI web server from the Debug menu
- In your favorite browser, go to http://localhost:12080 (the 12080 is the default setting; if you've changed that value in the JMRI preferences, use the correct one here)
- Finally, navigate to your panel file. If it's in the
user files part of the preferences (which is strongly
recommended) start here:
http://localhost:12080/prefs
then either click on your file, or navigate into the proper directory
to find it.
If you have put your file in the program directory (not recommended), start here: http://localhost:12080/dist instead.
For technical information on this, see the JMRI XML page.