US Army Geospatial Center is a MAX Finalist

The US Army Geospatial Center is a 2009 Adobe MAX Finalist in the Public Sector category. From the site:

From the battlefield to the densest urban center, Army warfighters now have instant access to advanced digital topographic and geographic information delivered in PDF. The application was developed using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, as well as TerraGo Composer, a plug-in for Acrobat.

Congratulations to Ray Caputo and all of the hard-working folks at the AGC. Please show your support for their efforts by voting at the MAX Finalist site.

Tomas Lopes' Presentation Online

Tomas Lopes' webinar is archived. Enjoy! More than 300 folks showed up. I hardly had time to take in any of the presentation because I was typing away at answers to the many questions that came flying in.

Ben Franklin Digs GeoPDF

FYI, Ben Franklin announced new world use of geospatial PDF at James Fee's Spatially Adjusted. Of course, James used "geospatial PDF", and I'm using GeoPDF to stir up the pot... We like to GeoPDF it up around here.

In the post, James kindly provided a pointer to the upcoming webinar wherein Tomas Lopes plays Ben Franklin, discussing how to integrate Acrobat into work-flows with geospatial contexts.

I think that there is something in the previous sentence that often gets lost in the obsession with the arcane details of format and who should do what for how much by when: Adobe Acrobat offers value for people who work with GIS and geospatial work-flows. Although I haven't seen the script, I'm sure Tom is going to go over this in some detail, so I won't try to grind through all of that here.

It seems that folks like to talk about the things things can't do or don't do to satisfaction. Acrobat, PDF, and GeoPDF are not exempt, nor from what I hear is ArcGIS. If there is something that you wish Acrobat would do, you can tell Adobe. If there is something that you wish Reader should just do for free, tell Adobe. If you want more features added to PDF exported from ArcGIS right out of the box, tell ESRI. If you want ArcGIS to interact more seamlessly with PDF files and Acrobat and LiveCycle work-flows right out of the box, tell ESRI. I can't recommend this more strongly. The more robust the platform, the better. Platform is the job of the platform providers.

If you want to get somthing that finds maps and items of plant using easy-to-use geospatial contexts into the hands of your field crews, talk to TerraGo [mailto]. If there is something you'd like to see in platform that you're not getting from the platform providers, say it here and stimulate some discussion. Maybe TerraGo will implement it in between the platform providers' release cycles, maybe not. Likely no one will if no one knows why it might be a good thing to have.

It would be interesting to hear how you think things should be. The more Adobe and ESRI hear how people want to solve problems, the more they will provide tools and interfaces that play together nicely. Sometimes TerraGo can help bridge the gap between what is being done and should be done by the platform providers.

What would be more interesting yet would be to hear your what data distribution and data collection problems and pain-points are, and who suffers. The ArcGIS jockey may feel no pain in a work-flow, but myriad linemen might be suffering at the other end. That's the person in whom I'm keenly interested.

If you don't want to work with TerraGo for whatever reason, you're always free to roll your own tools and solutions or talk with third-parties to help you do so. Like ArcGIS, Acrobat, and Reader, TerraGo's tools are proprietary. The Portable Document Format and the geospatial extensions thereto (GeoPDF!) are not [OGC] [Adobe/ISO]. I'll even try to hook you up as best I can. GeoPDF is an open platform, regardless of what anyone says to the contrary.

Although I strongly encourage use of this forum, if there is anything that you want to discuss, but don't want to do so publicly, email me directly [mailto], and I'd be glad to discuss it with you.

Getting Geospatial With Acrobat

Tomas Lopes is putting on webinar about using Acrobat in geospatial contexts. From the abstract:

Join Tomas Lopes, a geospatial database specialist at Farallon Geographics, on Wednesday, July 22, as he demonstrates how easy it is for GIS professionals to facilitate data maintenance workflow for individuals in the field by using Acrobat 9 with professional desktop GIS software. Combining traditional GIS software with Acrobat 9 is proving to be a fast and cost-effective way to create content that is easy to use in the field and easy to maintain in the office.

I'm going to be answering questions during Q&A. I actually have no idea about the details of the webinar beyond what's written on announcement on Acrobat User's, so I'm curious to see how it goes.

History of GeoPDF: PDF Map Books, LGIView, and LGIDict

GeoPDF has a history that goes back to the 1990s. Using PDF files for engineering applications was the brainchild of Phil Lee, one of the founders of TerraGo. In 1999, Phil, then vice president of Layton Graphics, bid on a project to deliver maps and engineering drawings to telecommunications maintenance crews. The maps and drawings came from scanned paper maps, AutoCAD and Microstation design files and backed by different database systems maintained by different engineering groups. Phil was an avid Acrobat user -- fanatic may not be too strong a word. He knew more about getting stuff done with Acrobat than anyone I knew then or since. Taking all of these heterogeneous formats and data to PDF and exploiting the features of PDF and Acrobat was obvious to him. The PDF solution was compelling because it was not tied to any CAD or database system, secure, and easy-to-use. The solution was to render all of the engineering data to PDF, add bookmarks and hyperlinks to ease navigation, and organize the resulting map book with an interactive index map. My nominal role in all of this was for the rendering AutoCAD DWG files to PDF, along with extraction and analysis of the data that they contained for creating links and metadata. Alan Stewart headed up the Microstation side of things. Alan had been writing software to manipulate and render DGN files for quite a while. He arrived at Layton Graphics with Michael Bufkin some years before in an acquisition of Michael's company Cad Share. Michael ran Layton Graphics' engineering group. Michael, Alan, and I are all still working together at TerraGo.

The PDF map book project was a big success for Layton Graphics. We delivered the first map book set in the fall of 2000 and last in 2005. We built a custom system that consumed the raw design files and databases and churned out 2500 map book updates quarterly, burned them to CD and delivered them to the different maintenance groups. These map books were popular with the crews, and soon received requests for new features. These features were usually exposed by creating plugins to Acrobat. This was the responsibility of JB Freels. It was increasingly obvious that a combination of software and carefully prepared data was a compelling application that could be used in numerous contexts. It seemed that everyone we showed our map books to wanted them.

One of the first attempts to productize a collection of PDF files specifically configured for engineering applications along with Acrobat plugins was called LGIView. Adobe profiled LGIView as a success story. Patrick Graves was brought on board in 2002 to serve as chief software architect and run the software development group. One of the LGIView features was a coordinate finder. Engineering design coordinate systems are almost invariably Cartesian, but they are sometimes aligned with some mapping coordinate system like UTM or a State Plane system. Since the working coordinates were Cartesian, it was a simple matter to embed a rotation, scale, and translation that mapped the engineering coordinate system to that of the PDF. This metadata was encoded in the PDF file as a PDF dictionary called LGIDict. My notes indicate that Alan came up with the LGIDict version 1 schema. I Ling Xu initially documented the schema and I gave its name: LGIDict -- LGI Geospatial Information Dictionary. At the time, I didn't know about Acrobat developer's prefixes, and JB didn't bust me on it.

Even as LGIDict version 1 was being drafted in 2002 -- we had deadlines and product to ship! -- the limitations were obvious. In 2003 I started working on a second version with provisions to drive a coordinate transformation engine. The LGIDict version 2 was cut in November of 2003.

OGC Publishes GeoPDF 2.2 as OGC Best Practice

After much anticipation, GeoPDF 2.2 has been published as an OGC Best Practice. From the page:

The intended audience of this document is a developer of software for creating GeoPDF. It specifies how to create the necessary PDF objects that identify a region of the PDF page as a map and describe the map’s coordinate systems. Map creation and rendering to a PDF page are not addressed. The underlying PDF file format is not addressed. The file format is specified in PDF Reference .
The reader will need knowledge of PDF objects and document structure. An understanding of cartographic projections and datums will also be helpful. Information about these can be found in Map Projections A Working Manual .
Though written with the PDF 1.7 file format in mind, this Best Practice is believed to be valid for all versions of the PDF file specification prior to PDF 1.7.

Things Get Quiet When Adam's Not Around

TerraGo's amiable and prolific blog poster and all around social media butterfly Adam Estrada has signed on with a three-letter acronym agency with some sort of if-he-told-me-he'd-have-to-kill-me sort of gig. Everyone at TerraGo and certainly I wish Adam all the best in his adventures.

Despite the quiet on the outside, we're full tilt on the inside working on revs of all of our software and I hope to have some news to share soon. If I can shake free of the mountain surrounding me at the office, I hope to get back to the technical series on how geospatial PDF files work and how to make them. If there is anything you'd like to know about this or anything else GeoPDF or at TerraGo, drop me a line.

TerraGo is at ESRI Federal User's Conference

TerraGo has got booth 123 at the ESRI Federal User's Conference. CEO Rick Cobb will be there, along with most of our sales crew.

TerraGo Composer for (ArcGIS) Server

TerraGo is announcing a new product today called TerraGo Composer for Server. It works like this: you interactively select an area of interest (AOI). Composer grovels around ArcGIS Server finding files and documents associated with the AOI. You pick the types of information of interest, and Composer creates a GeoPDF index map of the AOI with hyperlinks to the documents you selected.

First ARGON Mapping Satellite Lauched 48 Years Ago Today

The first ARGON mapping satellite was launched 17 February 1961. The ARGON satellites carried film cameras and ejected film canisters. The imagery was declassified in the Clinton administration. The CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD satellites exposed more that 2 million feet of film between 1959 and 1972. You can get the imagery and more information from USGS.

GeoPDF and GeoPS with Adobe-Style Payload

Here are the companion (Geo)PostScript and GeoPDF maps to those generated for the worked example. It took me less than 10 minutes to map the TerraGo sytle to the Adobe. We'll delve into the details of what I did in a subsequent post.

Isn't that PostScript GeoPS?

The PostScript file from georegistration worked example post contains a full georegisration. If you put some metadata in there to reliably extract that information, well, that PS is GeoPS!

What's up with the parens in the GeoPDF CTM?

In the georegistration worked example post, we calculated a CTM that takes the page coordinates in points into projected coordinates in meters:

[35.28267 0 0 35.28267 205188.64 3207094.8]

In the PostScript and PDF files, there are CTM entries:

[(35.28267) (0) (0) (35.28267) (205188.64) (3207094.8)]

Same numerical values, just the values in CTMs in the files have parentheses around them. What's up with that?

PostScript and PDF share a similar object system that provides a rich set of types. We'll go into the details of the PDF object system in a later post. However, we'll talk about the types in the two version of the CTM. There are three types present: numbers, strings, and an array. Arrays are delimited with the square backets []. Strings are delimited with parens (). There are actually two types of numbers: integer and real. These types were implemented in earlier versions of Acrobat as 32 bit objects. Real numbers used a fixed point scheme that traded precision for range. That range was too small to hold values often used in geodesy. More recent versions of Acrobat used IEEE 754 single-precision floats, the precision of which is not sufficient store values for geodesic calculations. Rather than try to shoehorn a syntatic extension that used native PDF numbers directly, we stashed the values into strings and extracted the values based on whether a string appeared in a numeric context.

Bonus link: David Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating-Point Arithmetic [PostScript].

GeoPDF Map for Worked Example

As promised, I created a PostScript file using the information we calculated in the worked example post. I created a GeoPDF file by running the PostScript file through Ghostscript to create a PostScript file PDF file that looks like this:


PostScript hacking is fine companion to cubicle lunching...

HT Klokan!