View GeoPDF Files in ArcMap

[DouglasCaldwell]

GeoPDF formatted data represents a large and growing source of information. The US Geological Survey is creating all new US Topo products in GeoPDF format and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is releasing scanned map products in GeoPDF format.

It would be a great help if ArcMap would be able to display these GeoPDF products ... at least as a background map ... if not exploit their content further.

[JorgeMendoza1]

Ask and you shall receive!! Not from ESRI

[MichaelStead]

ESRI should look into supporting GeoPDF's as rasters for background mapping.

Having said that...... have any of you converted vector data from pdf? There are no attributes aside from those relating to drawing styles.

The script in this thread uses gdal_translate, but you can now also use OGR2OGR to extract the vector data. Either way... this is functionality I created for myself, but it is difficult to distribute as it needs other users to have GDAL installed and associated with the same version of Python as ArcGIS. Everytime I update... it all falls apart again. This doesn't create support for the format really, just the ability to convert into something that Arc does support from within ArcGIS.

[ThomasMisek1]

When this idea is implimented, please retain the layers scheme in the GeoPDF and the ability to trun the GeoPDF layers on and off.

[KirstenPinkston]

With the release of ArcGIS 10.3, a new toolset, From PDF, was added to the Conversion toolbox. It contains one tool—PDF To TIFF—that exports an existing PDF document to a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Per the help, "If the PDF has georeference information, the TIFF can be a GeoTIFF. These TIFFs can be used as a source for heads-up digitizing and viewing in ArcMap. Both GeoPDF and ISO standards of georeferenced PDFs are supported."

[DaveVerbyla]

Sept 22, 2015 Arcmap Version 10.3  PDF to TIFF geoprocessing tool does not solve the problem...

[GreggRoemhildt1]

I just exported a georeferenced pdf from ArcMap, and ran the tool, ensuring that the option to Write GeoTiff was checked and it fails with error 999999.

[SheldonBaker]

Interesting.  I am with the DOI, and have a "smart-card".  We are probably behind on this.

[GeraldDaumiller1]

and GPX

[GeraldDaumiller1]

The basic desire is to have the geoPDF as a reference backdrop.  It would take a lot of work to get the raw data and make a nice map.  USGS has already done the work and put it in a format that should be a no-brainer to add to ArcMap, but we can't use it.  Being able to query the data would be a bonus, but please don't let Esri say that we can't look at the map because its too hard to provide access to the data behind it.

We can use ArcMap to create geoPDF files to share with everyone.  It would be so useful if these could be seen by other ArcMap users, or even ourselves in the future after the data has disappeared somewhere but we still have a georeferenced image of the map to work with.

[GreggRoemhildt1]

This may be irrelevant but might also be helpful for someone. QGIS opens and views geoPDF files on the fly. I think in some cases you may need to specify the coordinate system though, in the layer properties.