[QGIS-Developer] QGIS enhancement: export to GeoPDF

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 07/05/2018 10:19 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi Nyall,
> 
> Thanks for your thoughts.
> 
> And how about going through GDAL/OGR and exporting vector layers twice?
> One time as raster with styling preserved, and a second time as
> invisible vector overlays (e.g. fully transparent but still queryable
> (attributes preserved))?
> 
> My fear with upstream qt is, that:
> 
>   * qt is not geo-aware, but GeoPDFs need to preserve
>     georeferencing/coordinate system information. Upstream qt may or may
>     not accept "geo"-improvements to their PDF support. There is a risk
>     they deny such improvements.
>   * it may be expensive to implement, if we would have to improve qt
>   * it may be slow to get it into qt

Hi Andreas,

I always thought geopdf was a proprietary format? I googled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoPDF
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geospatial_PDF
Latter an iso spec implemented by several different companies.

I tend to agree that a Qt-path will be cumbersome.
But I think (even a limited) form of generating Geospatial PDF's would
be a very 'nice to have' in QGIS.

The ideas off course would be that styling would stay the same, but
agreeing with Nyall: mapping those styling from our world to pdf world
is a (too) big task I think.

Not sure if is possible to integrate the gdal-frmt_pdf more into QGIS?
Or: put money/energy in the gdal driver so it can handle for example
sld-styling rules per layer?
In that way the driver could be usefull for other GFOSS projects (like
mapserver etc) too?
Mmm, from http://www.gdal.org/frmt_pdf.html
You need gdal build with special (pdf)libs, gdal is not build by default
with those...

@nyall: would it be possible to create a (transparent) raster per layer
and use those for (Qt) pdf's? In that way a QGIS user would be able to
create multiple 'layers' in a pdf?


Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde