This TIL is written for content creators, authors, book writers, and other people who make files for distribution with Logger Pro.

Sometimes if you set up a file so it looks good on your monitor, it will look terrible on another monitor. In almost every case this is due to setting up a file on a non-4:3 aspect ratio monitor.

If you are making files to be included in Logger Pro distribution, or for posting to a web site, you should consider the following steps.

1) Set your screen resolution to 1024×768. Hide the dock (mac) or task bar (windows). Your screen may not look attractive at this resolution, but this step is the most important single step here.
2) Quit and relaunch Logger Pro. Set Logger Pro to use the full screen, and choose Use Entire Window from the Page menu.
3) Open your draft cmbl file, or start creating your file from scratch. Arrange screen items as you like.
4) Avoid blocks of blank desktop. You may think it looks good on your large screen, but screen objects like movies generally look better when shown at a larger size.
5) If the file includes multiple pages, make sure each page has a descriptive name.
6) Confirm that the data table shows the columns you want and in the needed decimal display( or number of significant figures). Consider moving the data table to another page where there is room to make it big.
7) Consider turning off sensor confirmation (settings for … in the File menu). If the file is not going to be used to collect new data, this will stop Logger Pro from asking if the sensors needed really are connected.
8) Set the number of points for derivatives to an optimum value if applicable.
9) Spell check any text boxes by copying the text and pasting into a word processing program. (This step not needed on Macs as they have live spell checking everywhere.)
10) Change the size of helper objects if appropriate. For example, if you are trying to show how cool modeling is, make the modeling box bigger.
11) Get rid of meters if they might show live readouts from unconnected sensors. This is confusing.
12) Do not lock screen objects. Let the user continue to adjust the file.
13) If you have related graphs (eg, position and velocity) group them by x- or y axis, as appropriate. This will ensure an examine cursor is synced between graphs.

Creating an experiment file on a wide-screen, high-resolution monitor (such as most laptops have today) is almost guaranteed to create cmbl files that do not look good on smaller screens.

Why does this happen? Logger Pro is doing its best to reformat the layout for various screen resolutions and aspect ratios. Some screen objects can be rescaled easily, but others (such as videos) cannot. If Logger Pro is scaling up to a larger screen, the worst that can happen is that there will be blank areas. In going the other way, things will be made smaller, and with fixed font sizes, the result will generally be unacceptable.

How can I improve the appearance of graphs from Logger Pro when pasted into a word processor?