Adding copies of pdf-based EFB documents for departure and arrival in the tripkit is on the wishlist for a while. The trouble is in finding code that merges pages of one PDF into a second PDF, up to now I haven’t found any 🙁 

a second option could be to somehow put the generated tripkit pdf and associated airfield pdf’s into some kind of “container” like a zipfile. But that would make it more difficult for many users to actually use those pdfs. If anybody has some ideas don’t hesitate to let me know!

We are working on a “first time use” manual for EV4, coming soon 😉

Hi Rob,

I'm a developer and wouldn't mind searching for or even programming something,

as I spend some time before each flight to check whether I already have a print

copy of the approach plates for the destination and the alternates and to check

if the version has changed etc.

Which language (and frameworks) do you use?

Cheers

Kambiz

Hello,

for my last two flights, I spent almost 15 minutes each to put together the necessary approach plates.

I just had a look at the APK. You seem to use the Marmalade SDK, but I couldn't find any useful information on the net about Marmalade's PDF capabilities.

In the Windows version, there is a poppler directory, so I guess that there you execute the poppler binaries.

If you could give me a hint, where to start, I could try to put together some code which you could incorporate into the product. I would of course transfer the IP rights to you or publish the code under an appropriate license e.g. on Github.

Regards

Kambiz

Hi Kambiz,

Poppler was used in EV3 to convert PDF documents to PNG and GIF images for export to Dynon SkyView systems. Because Poppler depends on a lot of sub projects EV3 supports it only on windows desktop.

Poppler is included in EV4's installation for windows, but its not used. EV4 currently uses a different PDF rendering engine (older version of xPDF) to generate PNGs from PDF documents.

The tripkit uses libHaru, a cross platform PDF writer. 

Our "problem" is we need cross-platform compatbility. Its not easy to setup a codebase based on C or c++ that is shared amongst Android, iOS, Windows desktop and MacOS. Currently the codebase for these four platforms is 99% shared code, apart from the Platform Abstraction Layer. 

So what we would need is C or c++ code that appends one PDF to a second one. 

Hi Rob,

thank you for the information. I looked at the documentation for libharu, which

unfortunately only supports creating and writing PDF files and intentionally

doesn't support reading PDFs.

If you would be willing to have an additional library dependency, maybe we can

find some lib which will allow for concatenating PDF documents. You could then

first write out the trip kit with libharu and then concatenate it with the plate PDFs.

I found a library which would allow for that and has an LGPL license, which makes

it in principle usable in commercial software:

http://podofo.sourceforge.net/about.html

The code to merge two files consists of a handful of lines:

https://sourceforge.net/p/podofo/code/HEAD/tree/podofo/trunk/tools/podofomerge/podofomerge.cpp#l38

and the library seems to build on Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Would you please have a look?

Thanks

Kambiz

Hi Kambiz, interesting find! I've pointed our middleware developer to that library, lets see what he can do with it. If you don't hear from me in two weeks, feel free to knock here to remind me 😉

Just a small update we're trying to get this feature implemented. Not 100% sure yet, but it looks promising....

And just to complete this thread, but from 4.0.812 on approach plates and other EFB documents can now be included in the tripkit 🙂