Introduction:
What is a Fixture Personality (from the website of 'lightjams')

The lighting industry offers lots of different lighting fixtures to play with. From the simple parcan to the wonderful world of moving heads, the way to operate those fixtures may be very different. One thing they have in common though is the DMX protocol, allowing to send commands to about any types of lights.

One DMX channel (or value) represents a number from 0 to 255, which in computing terms is a 8 bits number. When a fixture receives this number, it may be converted to light intensity or pan or gobo index... It is up to the fixture to do something with a DMX value. For example, a 4 channel dimmer pack listen to 4 DMX channels and convert each one to an intensity output. An interesting thing to note is that in order to have really smooth transitions, more than 256 DMX steps (0 to 255) can be achieved by using multiple DMX channels to represent a value. By combining two channels, you get 65536 steps (256 times 256). This is called 16 bits resolution.

A fixture personality or DMX template abstracts the DMX value representations and lets you work with more logical terms like intensity in percent, pan in degrees and gobo index.

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PROPOSAL FOR FIXTURE PERSONALITY FILES:
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- All Fixture Personality files are TEXTFILES (.txt) so they are easy to edit.
- ONE file for each Fixture/Mode.
So, if a Fixture has THREE modes (e.g. 3 ch., 5 ch., and 13 ch.), there will be THREE files.
-The Filenames contain Manufacturer, Model and Mode (MMM), separate by underscore (_)
e.g. Varytec_PrestigeII_256.txt
- Lines that start with an apostrophe (') are Comment-lines
- Each files contains a list of the DMX channels (in correct order)
- Each DMX channel is followed by 1 or more ranges (at least one)
- Each range contains the fields : type, max, label

General types (idea loosely based on the way that DMXIS does things)

V = Value ranges are displayed as a percentage (0-100) [This is the way that DL works today]

D = Dimmer. Only these ranges will react to the (Grand)Master Level control, and/or BlackOut

Ranges go from 0-255, should be in ascending order, and should not overlap.

If the label is .png or .jpg or .gif, the picture is displayed (for Gobo's and such)
If the label is blank, a percentage/value is displayed [= what DL does today]
If the type is in CAPITAL (e.g. 'D'), the value is displayed as a percentage.
If the type is in lower case (e.g. 'd'),  the value is displayed as 0-255.

Other types:

R = Red.
G = Green.
B = Blue.
W = White.

C = Color (for fixtures, like scanners and MH, that use filters to display color).

P = Pan.
Q = Pan Fine.
T = Tilt.
U = Tilt Fine.

F = Focus
I = Iris

L = Gobo (Logo)
Z = Gobo Shake
O = Gobo Rotation
N = Prisma Rotation

M = Macro.

S = Strobe / Shutter

X = Movement Speed (Pan/Tilt)
Y = Color Change Speed (Color Vector Speed)


That still leaves us with A - E - H - J - K. 

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Or should we go for TWO characters ? => More possibilities! (e.g. Gr = Green, Gb = Gobo, Gs = Gobo Shake…)