Origins of GeoPDF: Getting the Data Out There

Many, many moons ago, I worked on a project where we worked to get data out of the engineering groups into the hands of the maintenance groups within and across a conglomerate of telcos. I'm not sure that I can name names even to this day, so I won't. The secrecy never made a lick of sense to me even having considered it from a variety of perspectives, but a customer's confidence is inviolable. ANYWAY, I came across A Room with a Viewer by John Audley that illustrates the environment in which we were working and how people were approaching the problem and the remarkable efforts folks took to whittle away at the problem. We went with normalizing all of the engineering content to PDF and constructing map books by hyperlinking adjacencies, bookmarking street intersections, etc. We even "productized" what we did into somehting called LGIView, as mentioned in a previous post. It wasn't long before people were asking, "Hey! Wouldn't it be neat if we could read out coordinates?" As the picture shows, coordinates made it into LGIView...


Arcane trivia: MPLR = Mechanized Plant Location Records. If you knew that, LMK!