Georeferencing PDFs in ArcGIS Pro

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10-16-2019 11:00 AM
Status: In Product Plan
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KetiKonstantinova
New Contributor II

Hi,

In my line of work, I need to be able to georeference PDFs in ArcGIS Pro. We already have significant library of all the PDFs that we need (more that 100,000). For us it is a waste of space and money to convert all of these (and future) PDFs in TIFF or JPEG files.We will need additional space to store them. We have other programs that are using the same PDFs and will not work with other format of raster files. In other words, we need to be able to georeference PDF.

 

Thanks!

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35 Comments
JackFanZhang

@GeraldGabrisch maybe ESRI just wants to be kind so other geospatial software like QGIS could have some space in the market.

LarsArneson

This would be a very helpful feature. Leaving the file as a PDF  to maintain all of its accuracy would be much better than converting in many case. Not to mention the unnecessary step of creating a new file before georeferencing it. I realize that not all ideas can be quickly implemented but it is frustrating to see ideas like this sit for over two years with comment, kudos and thousands of views without anything being done about it. 

I had the opportunity to go to the ESRI conference in 2018 and chat with a few developers about adding the Mirror tool to the polygon editing toolset. The next update to ArcGIS Pro had the mirror tool in it..

TomDe_Leus1

I agree that this would really be very helpful.  I have several pdf's coming from CAD designer that I need to add to our ESRI GIS environment. It's so easy in QGIS, should be easy in Pro as well...

BobSage

I hope you've got your wonderful team of engineers working on this one!

Neil_Carlson

Endorsed. Georeferenced PDFs would be a big help.

KoryKramer

Thank you for the comment @Neil_Carlson    I took a look and it doesn't appear that you added your kudos to the idea. While comments are important, kudos (the number of votes) that an idea receives is one of the primary pieces of data that we use to determine traction and trends as we monitor idea activity over time.

Please see https://community.esri.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/arcgis-ideas for a high level overview of how ArcGIS Ideas works. For more details, see Frequently Asked Questions about ArcGIS Ideas 

Thank you for your participation in the community and for helping us prioritize future development efforts for ArcGIS Pro.

AZendel

Yes, please! The majority of site plans and plats that we receive these days are PDF (and they should be since PDFs preserve vectors). I'd love to see native PDF georeferencing without having to convert it to a separate format. 

KoryKramer

@AZendel remember to add your kudos to support this idea! Also, for you, and others following this thread, we need to be clear that the expectation is to bring the pdf into ArcGIS Pro as a raster layer, correct? 

AZendel

@KoryKramer , thanks for the reminder on the kudos. Done. 

It'd be ideal to keep the PDF as a vector format (if the PDF contains vector layers). So ideally, it would be like a georeferenced PDF or a "GeoPDF" once you complete the georeferencing process. 

LarsArneson

@KoryKramer @AZendel This is still something I end up wishing for all of the time. I lose so much quality when converting it to a raster.