Printing "In Depth"

I had a few previous posts (here and here) where I go over why electronic logbooks like MyFlightbook work the way they do with regard to printing.  But I never actually went into much detail about how to get the most out of the printing functionality that's there.  Well, forthwith I shall try to address that.

To print your logbook, go to "Print View" on the "Logbook" tab on the website.  This will let you specify a bunch of options which I'll discuss below, but the important link here is the one on the bottom of the page that says "Open a printer optimized view of your logbook".

That will open a view of your logbook in your browser that will incorporate the options you specify.  You can print directly from the resulting page, or download a PDF.

Two useful tips already:

• If you do a search and then open a printer optimized view, the result will cover only flights that match the search criteria.
• You can bookmark the printer-optimized view in your browser for easy access.  So, you could do a search for "Previous Month", and save the result in a bookmark.  Then, every month you could come back to the bookmarked link and it would be all set with the prior month's flights.

There are 3 main sections for customization in the printer optimized page.  The first one that you see (which is actually the middle tab) is the simplest one, and it simply lets you specify what sections you want included in the printout:

Let's walk through these one by one and describe what they do:

• Cover Page.  Pretty self explanatory: a cover page includes a header, the day of the printout, any address you've provided, and, if you indicate and provide, your date of birth.
• There are also options to repeat your mailing address and a headshot (if available) in the header of each page.
• Flights matching... By default, your entire logbook is included.  But perhaps you want to segregate, say, your fixed-wing time from your rotorcraft time.  By doing a search, you effectively create a virtual logbook that only has the matching flights; all totals will reflect ONLY included flights.
• Resume From Last Printout If you click to expand this, you can specify a date and a page number for printing.
  
  
  
  
  This does not change the set of flights that are included in the print layout, so the per-page subtotals will continue to match, but it suppresses the display of those pages from the printout, conserving paper.  This is very useful if you wish to, for example, print out additional pages each month or each quarter and have them pick up where your last page left off.
• Complete Totals includes your full totals (including things that are not at the bottom of each page) after your flights.  By default, this is the same report as Training->Rollup By Time, showing totals by time period, but if you select Compact Totals then it instead will be the same totals as under Logbook->Totals, without the various time period breakdown.
• Endorsements displays all of your "back of the logbook" endorsements (from Training->Endorsements).  Digital endorsements and photos are included; PDFs are not (they're already PDFs!).

The next tab is the "PDF Download" tab.

While you can print directly using your browser from this printer-optimized page (without the header stuff appearing on the printed page), you may wish to create a PDF; for that, you need to specify some of the printing options up-front, so that the system knows how to lay things out on the page, specifically page sizes and margins.

For page sizes, I support: Letter, Legal, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, Tabloid, and Executive.

You can specify all four margins; I do not support mirrored margins.  Margin measurements are in millimeters.

Normally, a page number is naked ("Page 42"), but if you choose "Show page count along with page number in PDF" then you'll see page numbers as "Page 42 of 57".

You then have two options for how to download the PDF:

• I will print on paper and sign each page (wet ink)  This is the default, and downloads a plain PDF file.  At the bottom of each page is a place for you to sign that page. This is the traditional method, and airlines and other employers typically want to see you sign each individual page to attest to its accuracy.  (Obviously, the "Resume From Last Printout" above can lessen the burden here.
• Or, if you want to do this all at once, select I have reviewed the logbook below and will attest to its accuracy digitally.  If you choose this, two things will happen.  First, you will be asked to sign with a mouse or finger on a touchscreen:
  
  
  The second is that when you click to download, you will not get a PDF file.  Instead, you will get a ZIP with two PDF's in it.  The first is the regular PDF, except that instead of saying "I certify the entries in this log are true [your name] _____" in the footer, it will say "I certify the entries in this log are true [your name] [See accompanying attestation for validity notes]."  The second is an attestation document that contains the signature that you scribbled and a digital "checksum" for the main PDF file.  Think of the checksum like a digital signature: you are saying that you have reviewed the main PDF document and are standing behind it.  How does someone reading this know that the main PDF document that they are looking at is the one for which you are attesting the accuracy?  They can compute a checksum on it and compare to what's in the attestation document.  Any modification to the original PDF will change the checksum and thus the reader can be confident that if the checksums match, then the main PDF document is exactly what is referenced by the attestation document.
  

The big kahuna for customization, though, is the “Layout” tab, which is repeated from the main Logbook page:

Many of these options directly impact page layout and row heights (and thus pagination and subtotal layout), so this is a powerful place to twiddle to make your logbook print out properly.  There's a lot here, so let's go from top to bottom.

Layout to use

This section dictates the most important issues of presentation.  

As of this writing (July 2026), MyFlightbook supports 17 separate layouts.  Pick whichever one you feel best fits your needs.  In Europe, you probably need to pick the EASA layout, for example; if you're a glider pilot, there's a layout for that as well.  As you pick a different layout, you'll see the changes reflected immediately below (and if you bookmark the page, you'll be saving all of these preferences), so play away!

Once you pick a layout, you have a few additional options you can choose; some of these may not be available in every layout (for example, the EASA spec is very prescriptive about things, so it doesn't allow for images).

• Include Pictures Pretty self-explanatory: if your flight has images, thumbnails of those images will be printed in-line with the flight
• Include Signatures If checked, signed flights will display the signature
• Use Flight Coloring If checked, then any flights that have flight coloring applied will preserve that color in the print layout.  (See note below)
• Apply shading to alternating rows If checked, alternating rows will get a light gray background to improve readability.  (See note below)
• Smaller/Normal/Larger - lets you pick a default font size to use

A note on background colors: on the screen, MyFlightbook uses various default background colors to help distinguish one layout from another.  These are strictly for the screen, and they do NOT print when you print using the browser, nor are they present when you download a PDF.  (Mostly to conserve ink and preserve readability).  Flight coloring and alternate-row-shading, however, *do* print.  Be aware, this can consume a bunch of ink...

Images and signatures each can cause a flight row to grow significantly in height, pushing everything else down on the page (and possibly onto the next page).  The system tries to account for this by varying the flights per page for signed flights or flights with images, revealing one of the tradeoffs that I discussed in my prior blogs: you can maintain the desired number of flights per page, OR you can display all of your data, but you simply cannot do both simultaneously in the general case.

Pagination

This observation leads directly to the next section: pagination.  Again, see my prior blog posts for why this is approximate (and why I recommend using "Continuous"), but this is a target.  The one promise made here is that a page will not have MORE flights than you specify.  

But the essence of the issue is that electronic is not paper.  In the paper world, you've printed the page before any data goes onto it, so you can either restrict how much you write on a line, or you can spill over onto subsequent lines.  In the electronic world, the layout and the content are generated together, and the layout can grow/shrink to accommodate the content.  (Making it more complicated is the fact that I have no visibility into how these two will interact; see my previous blog posts).

Anyhow...it's useful to be able to fine-tune the pagination to fit your data, your paper size, and where you fall on the tradeoff between density and readability.

• Flights per page (approximate) Personally, I recommend "Continuous" because that will fit precisely as many flights on each page as will fit, making optimal use of paper and ink.  The downside?  No per-page subtotals.  Alas, see my other blog posts, but many recipients of your printout want per-page-subtotals because apparently they think computers can make math errors (news flash: they can't).  Click the Expand button if you want some more depth on this.
• Row height (lines of text)  This defaults to "Automatic."  This lets software do what software does: if you have a flight with very little data, it only takes a line or two; another flight with lots of data may take multiple lines.  All the data is shown!  But if you specify a specific row height, then EVERY flight will be that many rows tall.  Got a flight with very little detail?  It will have a lot of whitespace.  Got a flight with lots of detail?  Whatever doesn't fit will be cut off.  (That's the inherent tradeoff, isn't it?).  But if you really, really, really want to enforce N flights per page, then you should pick a non-automatic row height and then you will get exactly N flights per page.  If you're using "Automatic", then you will only get a maximum of N flights per page.  Important note: the USA (Facing Pages) layout only works if with a specified (non-automatic) row height (because it needs a table on the left page and a table on the right page and they need to line up).
• Force a new page If you choose something other than "None", then a page break (and appropriate subtotals) will be inserted before a flight that reflects a new month or new year.

You can also manually fine-tune pagination in two additional ways that are worth pointing out:

• If you put "///--" in the comments for a flight, then not only will the slashes and everything that follows be excluded from the print view, but that flight will become the first flight on a new page.
• You can click on a flight in the print view to force that flight to start a new page.  If you do this, then on the screen (NOT in the printout or printed page!) it will get a red top-border.  Clicking on a flight that has a red top-border will remove its "start a new page" status.

Subtotals

The next three check boxes help tighten things up on the page a little bit:

• Show column totals simply controls whether or not per-page subtotals are displayed
• Normally, subtotals are Totals This Page, Totals from Previous Page, and Total Times. If you un-check "Repeat previous page totals...", then it’s just “Totals This Page”/”Total Times”  Totals from the previous page are obviously important if you're doing pencil-and-paper arithmetic, but serve no functional purpose in the digital world.  Sigh...some people want you to have them.
• By default, subtotals are broken down by category/class.  You can instead choose to break them down by "None" (everything is lumped together - saves a bunch of space on the page, but you don't get things like running ASEL/AMEL/Helicopter totals), "Category/Class" (ASEL, AMEL, Helicopter, Glider, etc.), Category/Class/Turbine (a lot of airlines like this), or EASA categorization - SEP, MET, MEP, etc.

Make/Model/Variant Display

The Make/Model/Variant Display selection should be fairly straightforward from the example above, letting you trade off detail and density as you see fit.  Choosing ICAO Only can be significantly smaller, and thus help reduce variations in row height.

Choose up to 4 additional columns

Available in most (but not all) layouts, but again this should be quite straightforward.  These allow you to have a distinct column for things that you want to highlight.  Perhaps it's solo time, or Turbine-SIC time, or Cross-country (XC) PIC time.  You get up to 4 of them. Your choices are based on what's actually in your logbook.

"Separate Properties with" and "Exclude these properties from print view"

The rest of the options have to do with “properties” that you've used in your flights.  This list can be pretty long. By default, these are put into the Comments or Remarks section of the layout, which can make that grow large.  For this reason, you have two sets of options here:

• Use “separate Properties with” to indicate how multiple properties are joined in comments.  A line break is most readable but uses the most space; a comma or a space, conversely, is more compact but may sacrifice readability.
• You can also specify which properties to exclude from printing altogether.  You may care about the price of gas on a flight, but a potential employer probably doesn't, so you can use this to dramatically condense the print view.

Finally, there's one other tool to help condense the print view: use “///” in their comments.  Anything after “///” will be excluded from printing.  So if you write “Flew with Bob today /// Had a beer afterwards” in the comments for a flight, it will print simply as “Flew with Bob today”.  Further, as mentioned earlier under pagination, if you use "///--", it will force the flight to be the first flight on the page before starting a new page; this can be handy to avoid "orphaned" flights when there are two many flights to fit on a single page.

If you have additional layouts or options you'd like to see, please send it to me and I can incorporate it.