Introduction
The Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader allows us to inspect and manipulate data from PDF. Let’s take a look at a simple PDF which contains a title, a couple of maps, some text, and a table.
Viewing the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader
Downloads
Workflow Steps
1. Add a Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader
Add a new Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader to FME Workbench or Data Inspector. Set the dataset to WallaWalla.pdf.
2. Set the Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader Parameters
As this PDF contains map frames - the main map and the little overview map (at the bottom of the page) - we can retrieve geospatial coordinates and coordinate system information for the map features. However, for simplicity, let’s read everything in Page Points.
Go to the Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader Parameters and set Coordinate Units to Page points.
Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader Parameters - Set Coordinate Units to Page points
3. View the WallaWalla dataset
Setting the reader parameter Coordinate Units to Page points will result in all features being read in page coordinates and split into feature types based on source PDF layers in Data Inspector:
Viewing the PDF document in Data Inspector
Need to retrieve map feature geospatial coordinates? Please take a look at Reading PDF Map Frame Content.
Data Source
The data used here originates from open data made available by the United States Census Bureau and the Berkeley School of Information.
