So here is an interesting application that popped up today. It is an automated chart finding tool that scours specific locations on the internet to find approach plates for airports you are seeking. (You can also add your custom locations). The tool has preset URLs for popular sites that host charts, and in doing a little searching for some plates seems to work pretty well. A couple warnings though (@fearlessfrog might want to chime in on whether this is a real threat or imagined) - I don’t know what the security risk is in sending out something looking for something and having it open a PDF automatically. I don’t know if that is a possible security risk or not. Second, I notice that Jeppesen charts and some commercial chart service charts are retrieved from virtual airline databases…I somehow doubt that some of these sources received permission to use copyrighted charts, so there is that to consider.
Long story short - use at your own risk:
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/50991-charts-finder-2/
Direct link to the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/abdullah-radwan/ChartsFinder2/releases
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PDF readers sort of went through a phase of being able to execute code outside their sandbox, so sort of became like a browser where a web page could access your local machine resources. Adobe left a lot of weird bugs in place for too long, but eventually they seemed to do better. Essentially the best advice is just to use the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (treat it like a browser, in that you wouldn’t run IE8 now, so upgrade) or one of the better other readers like Foxit etc.
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Yeah, I’ve been using Foxit for a few years now and like it…
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Does anybody, except me, use SimPLatesX? I have found it has a lot of airfields that are off the beaten track.
I do everything except the actual sim, off my sim PC…mostly on an iPad. All my aircraft manuals (FSX and DCS on Acrobat), approach plates (SimPlatesX) and FSX (and soon XP11) flight planning and flight following (GPS tracking) using FSWidgets QuickPlan and iGMapHD respectively. The latter also can also show NAVAIDs (tap to show freq) and airfields (tap to get data). It is set from the XP database.