With the new printing centre, I find the new PLOG format on A4 portrait is pretty much unreadable in the air.



Like many, I use an A5 kneepad, and used to print the plog onto A4 portait, and fold down a bit to fit. However the font size is too small for my aged eyes!



I would like to be able to remove a few columns - especially the duplication of To/From columns. Also ideal would be the ability to add/remove radio entries



The title is pretty horrible - if I plot a round robin route, it insists on calling it, for example, Bourn - Bourn,ignoreing where I am going. Could we not use the saved file name as alternative?

I strongly agree with the CCT's requests, in particular with the possibility to arrange columns for an A5 kneeboard, enabling a selective print option...



Thank you for your attention



CO2

--Charlie Oscar 2

We actually used to use the filename if the route was saved, and this feature didn't survive the transition to the new Print Center based PLOG. We've just now reinstated it for the 2.1 version and this will be in the next beta release.

Regarding the format of the PLOG when printing for A5, we are looking at ways to make this more readable. For the time being it would be helpful to have constructive suggestions as to how to achieve this. Everybody wants different things from their PLOG so we have no illusions about being able to please everyone all the time, but if a consensus can be reached as far as modifications go, then we will do it.

The latest PLOG format works well with the exception of the font size for the 'From/To' section. When I print the PLOG in an A5 format using the print 'Two Per Page' the font size for this entire section becomes significantly smaller than the other sections. If it would be possible to make all the font sizes the same as the one used in the radio frequency section that would be much appreciated.



Just downloaded the beta version 2.1, it looks very impressive and I'm particularly looking forward to trying out the Instrument screen in flight.

It would be useful to have an option to shorten the names of waypoints somehow. Perhaps using ICAO for airfields. If I am using A5 kneeboard format, having a column wide enough to accommodate 'Chichester Goodwood (ICAO)' means that the fonts for numbers get very small. Maybe wrap the text but break with a hyphen so one could retain a fairly narrow column width? If I add a user defined waypoint I get a very long pair of coordinates which also then reduces the font size for numbers.



I actually gain a little bit of font size by selecting orientation landscape, and then setting left margin to 1 and right to 135. I don't use the two per page because that sometimes makes the PLOG a little bit smaller than necessary. It is annoying that I can't set that as a default that is saved in settings. I have to keep reformatting every time.



Great package - keep the improvements coming!



Nick

Dear Tim,



it's really difficult to have a Plog that fits for all users, so could you resume the "save as..." option that I remember was in Sky Demon 1, allowing users to save the Plog in Excel format? So we could arrange columns and rows as we prefer without need of programming effort.



Thank you for your attention, and for this amazing software!



--CO2

--Charlie Oscar 2

The Plog can be transposed into SD mobile in big letters and columns which appear in a landscape format that can be scrolled through seamlessly viewing say 2, 3 or even 4 columns at a time in a touch screen set. I know this would mean more work for Tim & Co. However, this can be relied upon in the air, leaving the printed smaller version as a standby and for the pilot´s documentation throughout the flight. With such an arrangement one could have a large number of automatically up-dating parameters readily accessible throughout the flight, including but not limited to sunrise and sunset times.


Very Newbytheway

DurhamTeaseAirport

Some constructive thoughts perhaps?



1. I think it would be good to get a general purpose PLOG that prints straight out. Some people might want to fiddle around in Excel, but most of us just want to hit a print out and get a nice one.

2. The major issue I find is the huge variation in font size between the From/To section and the frequencies and beacons. It might be useful first off to fix a narrower set of font ranges which are generally considered readable. I think people will accept the odd page throw if they are flying through a morasse of frequencies.

3. It would be good to make the From/To items as abbreviated as possible. Just posting the four letter airfields (as suggestd above) is probably too cryptic for my taste. However, I would suggest dropping the lat/longs from the user defined waypoints, and dropping the four letter codes from airfield names. It might also be useful having a look on the database for long names and see if they could be shortened safely. For example, 'Wolverhampton' would be OK rather than 'Wolverhampton Halfpenny Green (EGBO'). You colour code the airfields purple anyway so they don't need any more info in my view.



Skydemon wins out because is it so intuitive and simple to use. I think you are right to avoid pandering to the huge variation in demand from the user community.

just in case you want also my contribution...

in the cockpit I found the route data rather small (I also use A5 kneepad) and the frequency data rather big in comparison to the route data

I would not mind to have the airports just by ICAO code

Talk of a spreadsheet makes sense. If you were to write an unformatted CSV, ideally bar separated, then easy to write a Macro in Excel or similar to import and reformat to ones preferences.



Otherwise one trick I used to use for manual PLOGs was to avoid having From & To on the same line, A single column will do, especially if offset half a line



cct