The new printing options are great, and I particularly like the 4 column.
How do I force a section to the top of the next column?
How do I add vertical spacing between sections?
How an I cause Label 2 to be right justified?
Where is the formatting cheat sheet with the codes? I inadvertently found one when I used a greater than sign and it caused printing with extra lines. So there must be a bunch of formatting codes, where are they?
Formatting codes are very retro - what happened to WYSIWYG? We’re going backwards here.
Sorry. The requirements you are asking for print are not that trivial. MiraCheck’s main focus is to be a digital virtual co-pilot. Although our print templates are pretty great, print is not a main focus, but more meant to be a backup in the scenario of losing all power. There are many print reporting engines out there, some more WYSIWYG, some more code driven. Someone tech savvy could use the export we have to csv as a datasource to a reporting engine if they really want full control of every aspect of how a print would look.
There are no formatting codes per se, so I am not sure what you stumbled on. Formatting of text is done with Markdown which is a standard that has been around for many years that is used on many blogs and content management systems. The power of something like Markdown is it is all represented with just plain text with a pretty simple syntax to learn. Here is a Markdown cheatsheet…
Note: not all of the formatting in the cheatsheet may work perfectly. There are many different markdown parsers out there and many deviations of the standard. Definitely the basics such as bold, italic, bullets and images should work. Others you would have to try at your own risk.
Thank you for the additional information. With respect to the product and work flow, my primary usage is with MiraCheck on my phone or iPad. However, there are two areas where the hard copy is important.
Emergency procedures. I don’t want to be flipping through my phone or asking someone who’s not familiar with MiraCheck to use it. I want two hands for the plane and as much help as possible. My emergency procedures are printed and laminated.
Other pilots. I will be sharing my plane with two others who may or may not use MiraCheck. I will give them hard copy for all checklists, both mine and the factory provided, and if they choose to use MiraCheck, I’ll share my lists with them as well.
So while I appreciate the effort that has gone into creating an electronic checklist, and I’ve purchased the lifetime Pro license, there is still a need for hard copy so MiraCheck’s printing capabilities are important.
Thanks for the feedback. There is nothing out there that comes close to the prints we already have in the product. Honestly I don’t know of any digital checklist that has a robust print feature. Being totally transparent, there are a huge number of feature requests that would come before adding more capability to print.
As far as Emergency procedures, in MiraCheck, you click the Emergency tab or specific Emergency button or if using voice say EMERGENCY. You are then immediately presented with a menu of what emergency you are having. You tap the title or say MIRA {section name} e.g. POWER LOSS INFLIGHT for the Emergency you are having and Mira conveniently reads each item in the emergency so you can focus on flying the airplane and just listen to the instructions. You can also easily pause/play her as she is reading by tapping anywhere on the screen.
I notice when printing the Quick Start check list that some sections were forced to the top of the next column when printing with four columns landscape option. Can you please tell me how that was done?
A second use case for printing is in a shared aircraft. I will have two dry lease partners in my plane and I need to be able to give them a checklist without requiring them to use MiraCheck.
A basic feature that should be included in printing is the ability to set the checklist switches / filter tags so that the printed list has the same content as when seen using the MiraCheck app.
For your first question, there was nothing special that was done. We use a third-party reporting framework and that is the behavior of feeding our checklist content. Printing in columns is no small task of a reporting engine, but sometimes there are limitations without having to go through an extraordinary effort.
I will state it again. MiraCheck CoPilot’s primary focus is creating a virtual co-pilot on smartphones and tablets. We have a huge backlog of features that our customers want to meet that goal that supersede the printing requirements you are requesting. We have always taken feedback from customers and the product has evolved because of customer feedback, but note that our primary goal is not creating a product to print checklists. The print capability we have in there already is unmatched compared to any other checklist product. You can always export the content as a CSV file and use other reporting frameworks to try to meet your requirements. If you feel it does not meet your specific requirements we would be happy to refund your purchase.