A Tale of Three Apps - October 2010

[allardjd 1,853]

A Tale of Three Apps

by John Allard

 

It started with Bob Puttre – he’s the one who planted the seed. If Bob hadn’t brought his new e-reader to the Ocala Flight Sim Club meeting and showed it to us a couple of months ago, I’d still be in ignorant bliss, not even knowing I had a need to be filled. Bob’s very nice Augen reader and his description of how he intended to use it got me thinking. Don’t you love it when that happens to you?

 

Bob described his desire to have a stand-alone, hand-held device for displaying maps, charts, approach plates and other documents while flying. Why not? It’s a brilliant idea. Some of the real-world aviation news sources I look at have been hawking various hand-helds for the RW general aviation pilots for quite some time. I had never thought much about it for flight simulation, but upon reflection, it really is a good idea. Score one for Bob Puttre.

 

We’ve become spoiled these days. It’s vaguely covered by one of Murphy’s famous laws that pop-ups expand to fill the monitor space available. Well, that’s not exactly what ol’ Murph said, but his version can be stretched to accommodate what I’m talking about. I don’t have a good place on either monitor for sectionals, approach plates, flight plans or any of the other things that might be needed in flight.

 

Both monitors are full of this and that and I don’t want to add a document display there. Also, if on the same PC but not running under FS, whatever application is used for the display of such things will cover parts of the FS displays when clicked on. Going stand-alone gets around that.

 

A hand-held is a good solution to where to put all that flight data without further cluttering up the FS screens or resorting to a sheaf of papers to juggle while flying. The savings in printer ink are also a plus – that alone will probably pay for this project – in a hundred years or so.

 

If further justification was needed, my dislike of moving maps or the MSFS GPS display provided it. Call me old fashioned, but when I look at a chart, I prefer to figure out for myself whether and where I am on it. Maps that move, keeping the current AC position at the center (or bottom center for the GPS) are a case of too much information for me. Paper charts never did that for me and I don’t want to depend on that kind of thing – that makes one more attractive feature for a stand-alone, hand-held source. I really do like the concept.

 

I followed up on Bob Puttre’s device but decided to plunge a little deeper. Being very good at resisting anything but temptation, I ended up buying what I believe is commonly known as a net-book. It’s a PC, but not much of one – what can you expect for less than $300? It has a 1 GHz dual-core processor, a 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB of memory and runs XP. It is wireless capable but lacks any external drives. It weighs in at an ounce or two over two pounds and has a 10” display. Between the wireless capability, some USB ports and an SD card slot, getting files into it is no problem.

 

What of the three software apps in the article title…? Well, I had to set the stage first. The need, now recognized thanks to Bob, is for a stand-alone flight data source. I settled on PDF files as the desired format for various reasons, not least because approach plates, STARs and DPs already come that way and several other useful things are easily available as or easily converted to PDFs. Over the course of a few weeks of fooling around with this, three apps came to hand and together filled the need for what I intended to do. I was pleased that all three are freeware, my favorite kind of “ware”. Download links for all three are at the end of the article if any of them sound interesting or useful to you.

 

Taking inventory first of the kind of things I wished to display led to the following list…

 

• Sectionals

• Enroute charts

• Terminal Area Charts

• Approach Plates

• Departure Procedures

• STARs

• WX maps and reports

• Flight Plan documents (from FS Navigator)

• Flight route maps (also from FSN)

• Airport diagrams

• Check lists

• AC performance charts

 

Certainly not all of them are necessary or applicable for every flight, but I am a detail-oriented flight planner, using RW WX and IFR flight plans for almost all my sim flying. Some significant subset of the above is going to be aboard for all but the most casual of my flights.

 

The first application is one I’ve been using for quite some time. It goes by the catchy name of, “Cute PDF Writer”. It’s a nifty little utility that installs itself as if it was a printer driver, and I suppose it really is. It doesn’t actually print anything, however. When selected as the active printer, it asks for a file name and location and “prints” the document, whatever it may be, to a PDF file at the specified location. It’s solid and reliable, works from within any application that is capable of printing and seems to handle text, graphics or any combination of the two with no problems. It’s a true gem.

 

This part of my application triad easily handles the creation of my FS Navigator-sourced flight documents in the above list as well as my airport diagrams (typically home-made in a graphics editor). It also does check lists if those are home-brewed, as they sometimes are. In a nutshell, thanks to Cute PDF Writer, if I can print it on paper, I can put it in a PDF file with no more trouble than printing.

 

The second application that helps me with this project is PDFKneeboard. It’s a marvel. One of my idle pastimes when I’m too lazy to actually write or fly is to browse the FS download sites. Among my favorite categories are Utilities, Misc. and Other, all pretty much the same thing with different titles on different sites. I spend hours chugging through lists of FS utilities in hopes of finding a hidden treasure - occasionally I do. PDFKneeboard is one of them.

 

PDFK is designed specifically for FS. It has both an FS9 and an FSX version, which unzip as dll files and install as FS modules. In a nutshell, that means they appear under the Modules pad of the FS Top-Line menu. PDFK does not replace or affect the existing, default MSFS Kneeboard. That is still there and still works as before after PDFK is installed.

 

PDFK is a re-sizeable, relocatable pop-up that appears when invoked from the Modules menu. It has a simple sub-menu, with options to Show or Hide itself and to Open or Close a file. A fifth menu pad has some settings options. All the menu choices have keyboard shortcuts.

 

Viewing a PDF document in PDFK is an eye-opener. It has some very neat features, mostly to do with the fact that each page of the loaded PDF file is treated as a separate entity. Each page can be easily panned, zoomed or rotated independent of the others. If page 4 of a document is a sectional chart that must be zoomed three levels to be read and page 5 is a flight plan document in landscape format and page 6 is a take-off performance chart that has to be zoomed out to be seen in it’s entirety, each will come back exactly as it was left when navigating between pages. Once each page is panned, zoomed and rotated to your liking, it will display that way even if you navigate away from it, make adjustments on other pages and come back.

 

Page to page navigation is via the mouse scroll wheel – one click is a full page each way. Page numbers are shown in the window header as you click through a multi-page PDF file. If a page is zoomed so all is not visible, a click and drag easily pans it. Zooming and rotating an individual page is also performed with the mouse scroll wheel, but must be accompanied by the Control or Shift key, respectively.

 

So far I had a means of printing files as PDFs and also a way to display them efficiently and effectively inside Flight Simulator. What more could a man want?

 

In practice, the business of loading and unloading several PDF files from the PDFKneeboard was not as seamless and efficient as I’d prefer. It can be done, but it takes mouse clicks and a bit of fooling around to identify and navigate to the next desired file. It helped to have them all collected in a single folder but it was still just a little unwieldy.

 

It occurred to me then that having all the documents required for a flight collected into a single PDF file might be better. I collect them for each flight anyway as part of my pre-flight preparations, so why not put all of them into a single PDF? Once loaded on the PDFKneeboard at the beginning of the flight, all are there to be browsed with a casual flick of the mouse wheel.

 

Enter our third freeware application, PDF Merge. This one, like the Cute PDF Writer, is used outside FS. Its purpose is two-fold. It can either extract single pages or blocks of contiguous pages out of a PDF file or it can stitch any number of individual PDF files together into a single, combined PDF file. For example, it can pull page 7 out of a PDF, or pages 6-9, or any other single page or contiguous block of pages.

 

Working in the other direction, selecting a series of individual PDF files into PDF Merge’s working list allows them to be “merged” into a single file. Prior to that, the component files can be arranged in the list to appear in any desired order. With a few simple steps in just a few minutes, it’s possible to shuffle a deck of PDFs and pull out any pages that are of interest, then roll them back into a PDF file that contains only the desired pages in the desired order. It almost takes longer to describe it than to actually do it.

 

If I haven’t lost you yet, we’ve seen three freeware apps employed to produce, collect, collate and display a conglomeration of flight documents in a single PDF file. Cute PDF Writer can print to a PDF. PDF Merge extracts and merges PDF pages to produce the desired single file. PDFKneeboard is an elegant way to display and use the file pages in flight.

 

There’s still a fly in the ointment, however – there always is. I did say stand-alone, didn’t I? However, the PDFKneeboard is an FS module application – hardly independent. The solution, if not elegant, does work. I installed an extra copy of FS9 to the net-book (that’s another story for another time – remember it has no external drives).

 

Once the flight documents are collected, merged to a PDF and copied to the net-book hard disk, FS can be run there, and the PDFKneeboard opened to load and display the flight document file. Yes, it does cover the FS instrument panel on the small 10” screen, but I don’t care, since that’s not the instance of FS that I’m flying. The actual flying is being done on the desktop PC. Conceivably, the two instances of FS don’t even have to be the same. It’s quite feasible to fly FSX on the big PC and view the flight docs using PDFK running on the netbook under FS9. It’s just a document display and depends on FS for nothing except launching it.

 

At this writing I’ve only done one flight of about 300 NM using this adjunct to FS. It works well, but my methodology still requires a little fine-tuning. I found that certain documents aren’t much needed and could either be omitted or relegated to the end of the PDF. In the latter case, they’d still be available, but would be out of the way of navigating through the more frequently used pages. Lighting and placement too is still up in the air, as is using the Shift and Control keys when needed for zoom or rotation. I’m thinking that the Free Virtual Keyboard, another freeware treasure, might be a solution for that.

 

This is still a solution very much under development, but I’ve seen enough to know that it is usable and useful. I’m headed in the right direction and I’m confident I will arrive at something that works and works well. In the meantime, this is great fun. It occurs to me that Flight Simulation is a lot like model railroading. Some enjoy driving the trains and some others like to tweak and tinker and build and improve their layout. All do some of each, but each practitioner inevitably gravitates to a place along the continuum between train driving and tinkering where he is most comfortable. I think I’m more of a tweaker than a train-driver.

 

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Download Links

 

Cute PDF Writer:

http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp

 

PDF Merge:

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/pdfmerge/pdfmerge.html

 

PDF Kneeboard:

http://code.google.com/p/fscode/wiki/PDFKneeboard

[stu7708 244]

Interesting idea there John, and actually something I've been considering myself but utilizing my already existing laptop as a stand alone document reader.

But considering the already almost full hard drive on it I might have to skip using PDFKneepad as I fear that a FS installation wouldn't fit on it, and just use good old Acrobat Reader for PDF-documents. One other idea I have is to use my Iphone instead, if I can find a good way to transfer files to it.