[QGIS-Developer] QGIS enhancement: export to GeoPDF

[Nyall Dawson]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2018 at 17:39, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
>
> Dear QGIS developers,
>
> One of our sponsors is asking if there are any ways/plans/upcoming improvements regarding export to GeoPDFs.
>
> Specifically of interest are:
>
> export of georeferenced data (query coordinates)
> proper export of the exact same styling from QGIS (the existing OGR feature styling would be too limited)
> ability to toggle layers
> ability to query attributes from vector layers
> Offer an export similar to the export of DXF (exporting multiple selected layers or the whole map at once).
>
> Now I know that GDAL/OGR supports generation of PDF, but the styling options are limited - see also http://www.gdal.org/frmt_pdf.html
>
> On the other hand, QGIS supports a lot of styling options which wouldn't be exported correctly when writing to GeoPDF through gdal.
>
> So here are my questions:
>
> Is there a dev out there who would be interested in working on it and who could make a proposal how to properly support GeoPDF for export from QGIS?
> Do you know of any similar QGIS users/clients who would be interested in co-financing?
> Do you have any ideas how to technically solve the issue of retaining style while also allow the querying of vector features? Perhaps export as raster to retain style with invisible (transparent) vector overlays?
>
> Thanks for the discussion!

My initial thoughts:

This would all predominantly need to be done upstream in Qt itself -
adding support for layers etc to the Qt PDF writer. We'll never get an
exact match between QGIS styles and OGR styles, so the ONLY way we can
create PDFs with exact style matches is by extending the Qt
functionality.

Nyall