The “Acrobat Reader of Geospatial Information” could be Acrobat Reader?
Written by Chad on April 11th, 2007James pointed out that if GE wants to be the “go all place” for GIS information, the ELUA really needs to be rethought. But, with the new release of Adobe Acrobat 8 and also Acrobat 3D does the “go all place” for sharing GIS information come to Adobe instead?
Personally, I don’t know yet. But consider this point though:
- Acrobat Reader can be used ANYWHERE by ANYONE with NO licensing issues
Way too early to tell, right now Adobe is pushing the manufacturing benefits of Adobe 3D, you can save most CAD formats right into Acrobat 3D now. Still have to wait and see if there are any GIS benefits for using Adobe 3D (though the cost is a big number.. almost $1000 for the software). But what is ESRI or Manifold offered an “Export to Adobe 3D” option?
11
AM
ESRI does offer export to PDF in 9.2 which doesn’t combine the various layers into one. It keeps all the layers separate. Which allows someone in the exported pdf file turn-on and off the various layers of interest.
Take a look at the new “What’s new in ArcGIS 9.2 March 2007″ pdf on page 134. They give a brief explaintion.
So, kinda, a canned GIS viewer.
Note, I haven’t had the opportunity to use the function yet. Still waiting on them to install 9.2, but they have been running to problems given all the crap the USDA maked people jump through getting software approved and tested.
KoS
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11
PM
I have done a cursory the “bang my head on the desk” examination of the exporting of maps to layered PDFs in ArcGIS 9.2.
A couple of tiny specks of dirt in my eyes included:
If transparency is used, everything below it is grouped to one raster layer.
Ephemera are grouped together.
Coordinate space is based solely on visual clues – by that I mean no popup location/length/area queries. Graticules, scale bars and area blobs (what are those things called that show how big an acre or hectare is at the drawn scale?).
On the plus side, it puts it into a common format, though I do have more problems with Acrobat documents ( wrong version, slowing down the system slurping resources, bailing) than a lot of the other image display formats.
Another branch here, geoPDF (terragoinc) is a take-off from the pdf standard, but I have doubts that it will get the momentum to make it an accepted “standard” for geospatial display, use and exchange unless it is bought by a bigger player or the standard is opened up.
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