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.
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