Patch ArcGIS 9.3 to support Adobe Acrobat 9 PDF
July 8, 2008 7 Comments
Because of a NDA of some sort, the Acrobat 9 support was never in the 9.3 beta program and even missed the 9.3 release. But never fear, you can download the patch to enable Acrobat 9 support:
Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader version 9 support a new version of PDF that allows for encoding of map coordinate system and georeference information inside the PDF file. This patch enables ArcGIS Desktop, Engine, and Server applications to export georeferenced PDF files.
There also appears to be some sort of agreement where Adobe will support GeoPDF in their Arcobat releases. My head hurts a little after reading those press releases (note to everyone, stop using the word “consume”). Hopefully TerraGo will use their blog to actually tell us in English what this agreement means.
About James Fee
This was driving me crazy I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get it to work. I tried checking the Resource Center but it wasn’t available. But eventually I did find a reference to this capability requiring a patch somewhere else on the ESRI page. I have just downloaded and am getting ready to test now.
It’s nice to see that Adobe has decided to take care of the Geospatial community. The next step is to get rid of the Acrobat Reader and start letting people just make PDFs already!
i’m still waiting for the mojo patch that will allow 9.2 to DC to 9.3 SDE, they give you the parts to go the other direction.
The NDA was more of a CYA until some people could get all of their “strategic partnerships” in place.
I just installed the patch and did an export. For some reason selecting one feature selects the whole layer. I didn’t have this problem with a GeoPDF I tried.
I have been playing around with the ArcGIS 9.3 patch too. I loaded the default Street Map data set and zoomed in to the Atlanta area. I chose to export features and attributes with the geospatial checkbox enabled…After running for almost 10 minutes, the layers appear to be flattened and no object data was created. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? Am I missing something?
A
I’ve played around with the patch and exported a few .pdf’s. It seems to work reasonably well. You definitely don’t want to export a huge amount of features, and no more than one or two attribute fields. If I just export one attribute field, it goes fairly fast. Once I had the .pdf, clicking on the features was somewhat quirky, as sometimes it would just select the feature I clicked, and other times it would select most of the features in the layer, and I would have to click again to get it to work right. I have no prior experience with this stuff, so I don’t know if it’s on the ArcGIS end or the Adobe Reader end. Either way, it’s a cool feature, and hopefully it will improve over time.
Hi James,
Per your request, something I hope approximates plain English …
Kindest regards,
G