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bigdeaner141 post(s)
#06-Oct-15 16:59

Does Manifold have the ability to export georeferenced PDF layouts?

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#07-Oct-15 09:55

You probably mean exporting a georeferenced drawing to something like GeoPDF and not a georeferenced layout, in which case the answer is "no."

Some discussion...

A layout is "paper space," that is, intended for the printed page or viewing on screen, and is not geographic space, so it is no more "georeferenced" than would be "georeferenced" a printout in PDF form of a Microsoft Word text document or a PDF printout of the web page that shows you this forum thread.

Manifold uses PDF to print out layouts, so no, those are not "georeferenced." See the discussion in the user manual topics on Exporting Layouts at http://www.georeference.org/doc/exporting_layouts.htm and Export Layout - PDF at http://www.georeference.org/doc/export_layout_pdf.htm

It *does* make sense to talk about drawings or images or surfaces being "georeferenced," but then you open the entire can of worms of what that means in terms of conveying projection information in a sensible, reliable and useful way that does not lay traps for users, that is, which is more-or-less safe.

To achieve such sensible, reliable, useful and more-or-less safe interchange Manifold exports drawings only to the most popular GIS interchange formats, as discussed in the Export Drawing topic at http://www.georeference.org/doc/exporting_drawings.htm

artlembo


3,400 post(s)
#07-Oct-15 15:00

GeoPDF is used heavily by the US Military. While not considered overly sophisticated, the reason for GeoPDF was that it was designed for the non-technical sergeant on the ground with his backpack and combat boots. It allows him to query the layer easily, and find where he is, and where he is going.

I think for future use, the GeoPDF might be a nice export format to support.

Mike Pelletier

2,122 post(s)
#07-Oct-15 19:24

Supporting GeoPDFs would be a very welcome addition. In the past, I've gone to the trouble of importing a Manifold created PDF (maybe it was a geotiff) it into Globalmapper and from there exporting a GeoPDF. Why? Because it is becoming a popular format for use with mobile devices using the Avenza app. The US National Park Service is exporting their maps in this format and people can download them and find where they are on the map using the GPS in their device. It's simple and PDFs allow smaller file sizes if no background image is used. Yesterday had a sheriff deputy ask for maps in this format.

hugh
200 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 02:19

must be a market if $3K software is selling from http://www.terragotech.com/products/terrago-publisher/opengeopdf http://www.terragotech.com/store/downloads/publisher-for-arcgis-detail

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 08:30

must be a market if $3K software is selling

Yes, there is a market and you can tell immediately from the price it is not a very competitive market. Welcome to the world of $3000 toilet seats.

That's the whole idea of using proprietary barriers to entry, to ensure that the vendor can extract disproportionately higher fees for goods that in a free, competitive market would sell for much less. Doing so also ensures the vendor can stick to higher reliability efforts like bribing public officials than taking chances on technology development.

If you want to play in that system you, too, can spend $3000 for a toilet seat. You should, of course, realize that playing in that market is not for beginners not either at the buyer end or the vendor end. Buyers should have full and complete political control of their apparatus so they can freely spend $3000 for that toilet seat when anyone with common sense would know just to go down to Home Depot or OBI or Castorama and pick up the same thing for $30 or 30 euros.

You should also expect that the overhead vendors must support to finance the RFP responses, lobbyists, lunches, presentations, and other small bribes (or even outright bribes in the form of political donations and such) required for them to play their part in the $3000 toilet seat system are not just the tail that wags the dog in terms of their dominance of the vendor's organization but are the dog itself. It's no accident that vendors deeply immersed in the $3000 toilet seat system spend 90%+ of their budgets on everything other than technology. All that facilitating of crony socialist friendship costs a huge amount of time, money and the best lobbyist expertise money can buy and such a huge effort overwhelms all the rest of the organization.

So there's none of this "Why can't you participate in that system and not charge me $3000 for the toilet seat? I don't want to spend that kind of money." It's pretty much black and white: you're either a price/performance vendor or you're in the $3000 toilet seat business but to date nobody has figured out how to be both.

dchall8
1,008 post(s)
#05-Jan-17 17:00

I'm late to the discussion but I just learned what a GeoPDF was an hour ago. This is off the main topic, but if you're going to be disparaging the military purchasing bureaucracy, you should know what you're dealing with. My reply is to the idea of $3,000 toilet seats. I used to be in R&D for the USAF and was there when the scandal of the excessively expensive common items hit the fan. Here's how that might happen. Government signs a contract to build a building for $3 million. The building was fully specified up front to give the contractors something to bid on. So the final cost to build THAT building is $3 mil. As with all plan, they never survive first contact with the enemy. Just about as soon as the contract is signed someone shows up and wants to change something. In this example an executive on the top floor wants another bathroom added off his office. Change orders are where the contractor makes his money. They know that - everyone knows that. The overhead cost for every change order might be, say, $3,000. So the contractor redesigns the floor with a new bathroom for $8,000 plus the $3,000 administrative cost of the change order. Then when the bathroom is finally installed, lo and behold, they forgot to put the toilet seat into the parts list. Another $3,000 change order is initiated and you get a $3,015 toilet seat. The bargain price of $15 paid for the toilet seat is lost in the roar of the $3,000 surcharge.

This example is to be distinguished from the $5,000 coffee pot for the C-5 aircraft. The C-5 flies global routes requiring very long flying times. There is a wet bar behind the flight deck for crew refreshments. My understanding is that the coffee pot was actually designed by Boeing as a military upgrade to the $3,000 coffee pots they put into airliners. Their cost was a lot. I don't know if $5,000 was the number, but it was a lot. Apparently they had a lot of problems with the item, and at least some of them have been replaced with Mr. Coffee from Walmart.

Не забывайте мыть руки

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#05-Jan-17 19:22

This is off the main topic, but if you're going to be disparaging the military purchasing bureaucracy, you should know what you're dealing with.

At times it is difficult to discuss why something like GeoPDF exists without going astray of the "nothing but Manifold tech" constraint on this forum. I really should not have gone into detail. My apologies.

I think you and I are in violent agreement, as your description of the process captures very well how the system works against prioritizing bang for the buck.

For that reason I had no intention of disparaging the military purchasing bureaucracy. They're very good at responding to the incentives which the system lays out for them. I merely meant to underline that dragging in military procurement as evidence that GeoPDF is either good value or makes sense is not understanding what the Puzzle Palace is about.

So, my apologies to all for going astray of what the focus should be on in the forum.

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 08:41

Yesterday had a sheriff deputy ask for maps in this format.

I fully agree the rentiers are effective. They're highly talented people and have been at this business of feeding at the public trough for many years. It's a good business, too, because once you get the higher ups committed to your "standard," folks lower down have an incentive to fall into line and use what has become easy for them to use.

Supporting GeoPDFs would be a very welcome addition.

Well, you know the drill: http://www.manifold.net/info/suggestions.shtml

I would be the first to agree that selling to government is a good business, especially to local governments where barriers to entry are less and people tend to make common sense decisions for the good of their communities and their organizations. The question is where that business falls within user priorities compared to the very many other businesses Manifold users find profitable. I strongly believe the best way to know that is how people vote.

I personally have nothing to do with formats which rarely are any big technical deal (once you've done the first hundred or so it is no big deal to do the next hundred) so I have no idea where GeoPDF lies in the great collection of additions Manifold users truly, sincerely care enough about to vote for. But I'd be surprised if it was anywhere near the constant drumbeat of, say, interest in tools for applications development, a greater focus on the data end of the technology and so on.

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 08:14

GeoPDF is used heavily by the US Military.

I cannot resist pointing out, perhaps not totally tongue-in-cheek, that one could not come up with a greater way of cursing a technical proposition than the above. :-)

But seriously, the choice of an organization infamous for applying infinite money in software under the twin, malign influences of concessionaire looting coupled with Byzantine internal politics, to end up with incomparably awful bang-for-the-buck results does not provide very many useful lessons for people and companies that operate in the real world outside the charmed circle of military crony socialism.

If you want Manifold to participate in that system you are asking for the mil-spec prices required by that system.

it was designed for the non-technical sergeant on the ground with his backpack and combat boots. It allows him to query the layer easily, and find where he is, and where he is going.

I respectfully disagree. It would be difficult to come up with a worse technical solution for the above than PDF. As the Wall Street Journal recently quoted a guy who was a state governor in the 19th century saying (forget the exact name), "They could come up with a worse choice and probably will." I suppose we should be grateful that nobody came up with the idea of forcing non-technical sergeants to deal with XML-based formats on the basis they would find that "easy."

Ease of use is primarily in the application, not in the format, which is the reason billions of people use non-PDF tiled displays like Google Maps and why many millions provide vector maps to their car GPS navigation devices with free data from OSM and similar in non-PDF formats.

A guy loaded down on patrol needs a fast, reliable, almost 100% read-only display. He doesn't do re-projections but just looks at images. Seriously, who couldn't think up a simpler system than PDF for displaying images or simple vector formats? You can easily achieve that, as does Google Maps and endless other similar applications, with absolutely ordinary graphics formats such as JPEG or TIFF with embedded tags, or a variety of simple vector formats. Such formats are utterly trivial, fast, compact, very secure and free. They are "open" too for folks who value such things.

In contrast PDF is highly insecure because it is a language, not a format. It is no accident that phishing hackers love to email "PDF" files to Grandma to cut into her bank accounts. If you like the idea of tens of millions of people having hundreds of pages in confidential applications for security clearances as well as their fingerprints harvested by hackers you'll love the idea of adversaries hacking PDF based applications in wartime.

To display a PDF that sergeant must have a computing device in his hand that executes a program, and if he does not want to have a security hole he has to keep that danged program updated. That's not easy to do in the field and it is a guarantee that many users could be subject to version skew. At best updates will only get rid of security holes that the military knows about and perhaps learned about... what? years ago? given how fast they move. It also uses processor cycles that are not necessary for simpler and more effective formats and, of course, it is proprietary.

If you look at the economic effects you could be forgiven for concluding that GeoPDF was designed to extract money as a proprietary solution out of organizations that are either deeply into the crony socialist food chain or which are staffed by people who can be tricked into shoveling public money into the hands of guys whose business model is feeding at the public trough (see comment to the post below).

A more benign interpretation is that if someone has a product like GeoPDF their product marketing staff is always looking for ways to get more out of that, perhaps through "line extension," that is, by adding related products that can be sold to people who have invested into the base product. All that's fair game. But when you see uptake primarily in the crony socialist food chains and very little in the free choice of individuals and companies subjected to real world economic discipline, well, you could be forgiven for concluding the heart of the matter is something other than optimal choices in technology.

I personally don't think there is anything awful about GeoPDF, just that for military purposes there are far better technical approaches and for private use, likewise, especially for data interchange that is a central need for most GIS users.

RonHendrickson
283 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 14:05

Guys, while I don't have an oar in the water concerning GeoPDF, I would like to state publicly that I can't stand Adobe software. Everything works differently, I normally get lost trying to do something with any of their packages, they are almost completely non-intuitive. Also, there is usually a much cheaper or free product somewhere that can do most of what they do.

Talk about $3,000 dollar toilet seats, as far as I am concerned that analogy fits Adobe perfectly.

My two cents.

artlembo


3,400 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 15:00

I respectfully disagree. It would be difficult to come up with a worse technical solution for the above than PDF

No disrespect taken. The technical issues you raise are all valid, as are the pricing mechanisms for the military. Nonetheless, there is a backstory to geoPDF that your post didn't indicate.

I went to college with the guy who invented GeoPDF (we were Geography majors). And the "soldier on the ground" was exactly the reason they came up with it. He told me he hears about the problems with GeoPDF all the time, and he agrees with much of it.

Years ago I had him come and speak to our students, and he and I talked about this very thing - the better options out there. One of the things he reminded me of was that GeoPDF was created before the iPhone, or any other real handheld device. It was also during the time where the soldier in the field was using those ruggedized Husky laptops. The GPS navigation back then was a GPS unit with a cable attached to the Husky. So, you have to be thinking about late 1990's technology.

What made GeoPDF easy for them was that the solder could load the .pdf file on their ruggedized Husky, and they had everything they needed - no real overhead, no internet connection, nothing. Just a guy in the desert by himself. Every soldier knew how to open a .pdf - just double-click. So, they didn't want an application with drop down windows, or any GIS analysis. They wanted a solder to click on the .pdf and have a map that they could use to navigate, or use the Find to type in the name of a city. So, nothing special, just a queryable map that required no more than the ability to open a .pdf.

I remember talking to the IT Director of a large railroad - he was being hammered about the use of COBOL in their shop. Totally outdated, and much better tools. But, what he said to me was:

for 40 years, we've been cutting paychecks every two weeks. It has never failed.

I developed a degree of sympathy for his situation - on some level, that is still one of the funnier things I've heard an IT guy say!

So, you are correct, technology and time have marched on. However, there is still a fair number of people out there that use GeoPDF, so it's probably worth having an export format.

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 19:49

Every soldier knew how to open a .pdf - just double-click. So, they didn't want an application with drop down windows, or any GIS analysis. They wanted a solder to click on the .pdf and have a map that they could use to navigate, or use the Find to type in the name of a city. So, nothing special, just a queryable map that required no more than the ability to open a .pdf.

Look, all that is laudable and I don't for a moment criticize the desire. For that matter, I don't personally dislike PDFs at all. In fact, when I circulate travel plans to extended family I always take the Word format original and I write it out to a PDF. Some of my extended family use Apple gadgets, either by choice or because their work environment requires it, so when I circulate a PDF they all can use it.

But that and every other characteristic that users see is a function of the Adobe program that launches to make sense of the PDF, not of the language spec. Why can my extended family using Apple gear read the PDF? ...because the Adobe app that executes the language has been ported to Apple and runs there. It's not because there is something exceptionally deep and wise about the proprietary language Adobe has for displaying documents.

What the user experiences when they double-click a file that is associated to that application depends entirely on the application. For that matter, it is the association with a given file type by default that makes something happen automatically when one double-clicks on that file. When you correctly note "Every soldier knew how to open a .pdf - just double-click"... well, that's the case with every file that has an application associated with it. When you double-click a .pdf that launches the Adobe application that displays it. Double-click a .txt and it opens it in whatever is your associated application to handle that file type, such as perhaps Notepad for text, and so on.

Preferences in user interfaces are very much a matter of personal taste. I don't particularly like, for example, what is to my taste the somewhat alien, non-Microsoft way Adobe Acrobat programs interface with you when displaying PDFs. But it is not a big deal as I really don't do much with PDFs but look at them in a simple way. Other people may absolutely love the interface.

But from a lot of experience both using information in a geographic context and watching other people do so I do not at all believe that Adobe programs originally intended to display text documents can do as good a job, especially if simplicity and ease of use are the prime objectives, in providing geographic info to people in high pressure situations as could a program intended to make navigation and other uses of maps simple and effective.

An example of that, besides military uses, are in-car navigation systems. When driving a car you really don't have any extra attention span to spare to puzzle out complex GUIs. But at the same time you often do want to do just a bit more than watch a moving map. For example, sometimes you want it North up and sometimes automatically rotated into the direction you are moving. You may want to have it automatically start up navigation after you've stopped for an espresso at a rest area or recalculate routes when you've deliberately driven off your route to look at something interesting nearby or whatever. All that and much more can be accomplished with very simple GUIs that are oriented to the needs of map consumers, but such GUIs do not so easily evolve from interfaces aimed at the needs of people consuming text and documents.

To get back to military users, it's not a choice of well, with PDF you get double-click and you get immediate viewing plus a simple interface to navigate or to find the name of a city, and if you use something else it can't be anything but a full-blown GIS and you won't be able to double-click to automatically open. There's no reason that something else could not also be double-click to instantly view in an application that's even better suited to the needs of harried soldiers than Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Take a look at the magnificent software that individuals or small teams have produced for open source navigation with in-car systems, using cell phones, tablets or small computers to replace proprietary devices such as Garmin or Tom Tom units. They all have interfaces that provide more utility for navigation in distracted environments than Adobe Reader. Surely the needs of soldiers would justify the very slight effort (even back in the late 90's it would have been very slight) to provide a simple display that's better than Adobe Reader for their needs.

But then I take your point that "well, it already existed." I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of utility in just having something that can be put into play without all the Pentagon bureaucracy's antibodies rushing in to destroy the foreign invader that suggests anything should be done in less than ten years at a cost of less than a few billion. So the notion of a "light" application that's better suited to a soldier's combat navigation needs than Acrobat Reader could well be absurdly unrealistic.

...By the time they'd be done with the "light" application there would be different versions for every service, it would be larger than Ada and it would be waiting on a new generation of custom superconducting computers that needed a billion dollars in development in order to have the horsepower to run it. :-)

Mike Pelletier

2,122 post(s)
#08-Oct-15 21:24

Wow! Dimitri you are on a roll :-)

So what is needed is a good way to make a well labeled map and export it for simple viewing/finding locations on mobile devices offline using a free/low cost app with good performance. I'd really like to find that.

Crazy me, I still like making maps in Manifold. Its mostly because its wonderfully stable with huge data and great for doing GIS gymnastics (copy, paste, clip, transform, etc.) Usually I'm making enough changes to the GIS layers that exporting to another program isn't worth the hassle. The cartography workarounds in Manifold are good enough. One exception is the long standing problem of labels following too closely a curved line to the point of being unreadable. Yuck! A pain to fix manually. My vote has been in on this for a long time. :-)

So if I'm making a map in Manifold, how best to get to the mobile device? The open source formats/solutions you mention suggest we should look at QGIS.

I can't say that I've seen geoPDF work with big data (have others?) so I'm not necessarily completely sold on it.

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#09-Oct-15 19:12

The open source formats/solutions you mention

I didn't mean to suggest that you force yourself to use only "open" source but instead I chose a pointed counter example to the notion that the military had no choice but the proprietary software equivalent of a $3000 toilet seat. If John Doe can cobble up and provide for free perfectly usable means to display cartographic data in situations where users are really stressed out and have limited attention spans, like driving in Paris traffic, well, then such a really simple solution is clearly not beyond the technical means of the US government.

So if I'm making a map in Manifold, how best to get to the mobile device?

Easy: I use Manifold itself, which, of course runs on my Windows tablets. For truly sophisticated and high value needs, like buying real estate or, say, archaeological discovery, nothing compares to the value and effectiveness of a full GIS.

You can also launch a browser and visit your IMS site if you have mobile Internet, which is becoming even more ubiquitous than it already was. I prefer not to use microscopic screens to view rich data but on those occasions when I want consumer level cartography on, say, an Android telephone, I just launch Google Maps. There is absolutely no reason to use GIS when far simpler utilities will do.

As for car navigation, I'm lazy: I use whatever is the built in navigation system in the car I'm driving, or, on those rare occasions when in the very most demanding traffic situations like trying to get from one side to the other of New York, Paris or Moscow I'll use Google via the web as they seem to do the best job with real time routing updates based on contemporary traffic data. I have local SIM cards for data or good data roaming wherever I travel so Internet access on the road is not usually an issue.

But the above are just off-the-cuff remarks based on my personal experience and tastes. Other people no doubt have different tastes and a different balance in their priorities and needs. I seem to recall many prior threads on mobile use on this forum for those interested in the more thoughtful remarks and experience of their colleagues for the display of GIS data on mobile devices.

Mike Pelletier

2,122 post(s)
#09-Oct-15 19:44

Thanks for your thoughts on that Dimitri. My needs are offline and the viewer program needs to be ultra simple. A few years ago, I had some success with an app called Locus. It was pretty simple and $6 you get the Pro version which allows viewing images on the device stored in MBtile format (good compression). It imports KML and shapefile. Probably not as simple as geoPDF but much more capable.

steveFitz

340 post(s)
#12-Oct-15 07:34

Mike (and bigdeaner14 whom originally started the thread but, I suspect, was scarred off by certain prolix posts!),

I haven't done any research but perhaps its possible to write a script using GDAL to export or import GeoPDFs?

Anyone game?

http://www.gdal.org/frmt_pdf.html

Is it possible?

tjhb
10,094 post(s)
#12-Oct-15 07:49

Exactly what research have you not done, and by whom?

BerndD

162 post(s)
#14-Jan-17 00:56

Exporting a GeoPDF from Manifold with GDAL is possible. We do have a small internal tool that does exactly that.


Organizations that want to adapt to CHANGE are using products that can adapt.

www.yeymaps.io

rwells4 post(s)
#21-Jan-17 02:31

If ever you have the inclination to share that I imagine there would be many who would love it! If not, well done on making it anyway, hopefully it will inspire someone smarter than I to recreate it.

I use them regularly to allow interaction with iDevices, which are so ubiquitous. I deal with farmers not soldiers, but I would guesss there are similarities, where a low level of client tech knowledge is common and their devices need to be small, rugged and multi-use. Few systems do this as elegantly as Apple.

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