Chapter 14: PDF Mapping Michael Bufkin

Overview

The use of PDF for mapping applications began soon after the first Acrobat products went on sale. Indeed, in his seminal 1991 paper that defined the concept of PDF, "The Camelot Project", John Warnock, then president of Adobe, envisioned a file type that would allow authors of documents to distribute their work in a format that could be accurately displayed and printed on almost any computer or digital printer, including "military maps and complex map collections" [1].

With the advent of the Internet, the advantages of providing users and customers with a single, self-contained file that could be used to display maps which had previously been available only as paper or as complex, proprietary files was obvious. Today, almost all federal, state and local governments are providing mapping data to the public in PDF form, and many commercial map-making enterprises are delivering their map documents in PDF format.

In this Chapter

Working with maps in PDF presents its own challenges and issues. In this chapter you see how to identify these issues and discover means to solve them in discussions and case studies provided by a leader in the PDF mapping field:

• Producing a PDF version of a map from a variety of different types of source material can result in a number of issues, depending both on the source map and the intended use of the PDF map.

• Map PDF files can use the same Acrobat security and navigation features as other types of PDF file.

• Geo-registration is...