Printing and exporting a slate

What it is

The slate export turns your deco schedule into something you can carry underwater. You export the plan as a PDF sized for A6 paper, a PNG image, or plain text. Print the PDF, trim it, and laminate it for a wet-notes page or a writing slate. The layout is high-contrast and built for black-and-white printing, so it stays readable at arm’s length in poor light.

The slate is a quick-reference card, not the full planner. It shows the schedule and the numbers you need in the water, laid out to be legible when you cannot tap a screen.

Export a slate

What the slate shows

The slate always carries the core schedule and the headline stats. The base table has four columns:

Column	Meaning
Depth	The stop depth
Stop	Time held at that stop
Run	Cumulative runtime at that point
Mix	The gas (or mix) breathed there

Above the table, the header always prints the plan name, GF (gradient factors, for example 50/80), TTS (time to surface), runtime (RT), ascent pressure, and turn time. On a bailout view that pressure line is labelled “Bailout Gas Required” and reports the gas the bailout ascent needs, not a gauge reading. Below the table, the footer always prints OTU (oxygen toxicity units) and CNS%, then labels the algorithm (Bühlmann ZH-L16C). None of these depend on a toggle. When you are exporting a contingency or a bailout view, the slate’s title says so, so a +3 m card never gets mistaken for the base plan.

On a CCR plan the sheet only labels a card Full Bailout when there really is an open-circuit bailout schedule to print. If the scenario you picked has no bailout gas left, the planner keeps it on the loop, so the card prints the loop ascent and drops the bailout label, and a line under the export buttons tells you why.

You can add up to three optional columns:

• PPO₂: the oxygen partial pressure at each stop.
• CNS: the running central nervous system oxygen-toxicity percentage.
• Remaining Gas: how much gas is left as the dive progresses. On the slate this column is headed Bar or PSI (whichever pressure unit you use), not the words “Remaining Gas”. It follows the plan modifiers in force for the scenario and view you are printing, so its last figure reconciles with the Gas Required totals on the planner screen instead of quoting a different rate.

Each extra column makes the slate wider, so the more you add, the smaller the print gets to keep the card on one A6 width. Toggle on only the columns you actually want in the water.

If the plan carries a delay before ascent, that hold prints as its own row: a timer glyph instead of the stop dash, and the word Delay under the depth. It is a stop in every sense the schedule cares about, but it is the one you chose rather than one the model imposed, and a laminated card that could not tell the two apart would be misleading at depth. The plain-text export marks it with the same glyph and explains it on one line under the table, because a monospace grid has no room for a word inside the depth column.

Comparing two scenarios

Divers often want the base plan and one contingency on the same card: base on the left, lost deco gas on the right, one laminated slate instead of two. Tick Compare two scenarios, sitting just under the scenario tabs, and pick the right-hand scenario from the second row of tabs that appears below it. The left tabs pick the left column; selecting the right column’s scenario on the left simply swaps the two sides.

What changes in compare mode:

• The card becomes A5 (148 by 210 mm) instead of A6. Two schedules on an A6 card would print at about 8 pt, which you cannot read at arm’s length in the water. On A5 they print at about 11.5 pt.
• One optional column, not three. Each optional column is paid for twice, once per side, so compare mode keeps the first one you have on and turns the others off. With one extra column the print drops to about 9.6 pt.
• Rows line up by position, not by depth. Row 3 on the left and row 3 on the right are simply the third row of each schedule. A lost-gas ascent has its own stop ladder, so the two sides will not share depths. A heavy rule runs down the middle to stop you reading across, and when one schedule is shorter its remaining cells are left blank.
• Each side carries its own header: the scenario name, its own GF, TTS, runtime, ascent pressure (or bailout gas required, on a bailout view) and turn time. Those repeat at the top of every page, so page 2 of a long plan is never an anonymous column of stop times. If one scenario ran at a raised GF-high, the sheet names that column before you export.
• On a CCR plan both columns share the view chip (loop, full bailout, or bailout at a depth). Comparing two schedules only means something when both were computed the same way. On the full bailout view that also means both scenarios need bailout gas to breathe. If one of them has none, there is no bailout ascent to show, so the card falls back to a single column and the sheet tells you the view has no second schedule to put beside the first, rather than printing a loop ascent beside a bailout ascent.
• Copy Text stacks the two schedules instead of printing them side by side, because side-by-side monospace does not survive a chat message. The plan name and, on a bailout view, the bailout label print once at the very top, above the left schedule, so a pasted export still says which dive it is and what kind of ascent both ladders are.

Choosing a format

Format	Best for	Notes
Share as PDF	Printing and laminating	Vector output sized for A6 paper. Prints sharp at any size and paginates long plans across A6 pages, with the column header repeating and rows never splitting. This is the recommended path for a printed slate.
Share as Image	A quick photo to send or save	A PNG snapshot of the slate, captured at your phone’s screen density, so a higher-resolution phone prints sharper (about 1008 px wide on a 3x screen, 672 px on a 2x screen, roughly 244 or 162 dpi at 105 mm wide). It has no embedded paper size, so for a crisp laminated slate prefer the PDF. Fine for sending to a buddy or keeping on your phone.
Copy Text	A plain-text fallback	A text version of the schedule for pasting into notes or a message. In compare mode the second schedule is stacked underneath the first, not placed beside it, with the plan name and the bailout view printed once above both.

Printing tips

The PDF is built for A6 paper (105 by 148 mm), a standard cut size that home printers, office paper, and slate guillotines all handle. Compare mode prints on A5 (148 by 210 mm) instead, which is the same trim-and-laminate job on a bigger card, though it no longer slips into a wet-notes page. To get a clean laminated slate:

1. Print the PDF at A6 (or at 100% on A4 and trim to the A6 border). The PDF already includes a small printer-safe margin so nothing gets clipped at the edge.
2. Trim along the page edge, leaving a little room around the content.
3. Laminate it, or slip it into a wet-notes page.

If your plan is long, the PDF spreads the table across multiple A6 pages and repeats the column header on each, so a single stop never gets split between two cards.

Related

• Deco Planner is where you build the schedule you export.