Mapping Hacks

Layton Graphics has released a
plug in for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader that lets you georegister a PDF.
This is more or less the same as georeferencing a raster image.

George Demmy says it best, so I’ll just quote his mail to the geowankers list

Layton Graphics, the company I work for, has released a plug-in to
Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader that makes it possible to georegister a
PDF, after which you can do stuff like display coordinates in
different projections and datums, zoom to coordinates, make
measurements, get the map azimuth of a line, and check the magnetic
declination (via WMM 2005), import data from CSV and shape files,
etc. If your laptop has a GPS, you display where you are on a
GeoPDF. It’s free to play with, and the you can temporarily
georegister PDFs in either version. A fellow employee bought a
panasonic toughbook off ebay for $150, and with a $50 GPS has got
himself a Dusie of system for recording where his bass holes are.

The plug-in is available at

http://www.layton-graphics.com/downloads.html.
We’ve got a blog in its
infant stages at

http://geopdf.blogspot.com,
wherein we’re going to
post tips, tricks, and what’s going on with the development of the
plug-in. I work on the geodesy naughty bits. If you’ve got questions
or concerns fire away.

There are a couple of example maps on the download site, but you can
georegister any PDF, whether it’s a map or not. You’re probably
familiar with the UT library map collection at
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html — it’s a good place to get
PDF maps and JPEGs easily converted to PDF, and then to GeoPDF.

One of the more interesting bits of information from that post is that Toughbooks
are available on ebay for $150. Those are great computers. I remember Matt Westervelt and Terry talking about their Toughbook fights when we were at Etech in 2002…any computer you can fight with is ‘da bomb.’

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