[Xastir] GeoPDF

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 09:08:10AM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <russo at bogodyn.org> flavor, containing:
> 
> I'm not going to hack Xastir to handle 24-bit, but I've been working on a 
> script to deal with this process (and an extension of it) and hope to release
> it this afternoon. 

Or this morning.  Please do a cvs update and look for the "geopdf2gtiff.pl"
script in the scripts directory.  It installs to /usr/local/lib/xastir, too.

geopdf2gtiff.pl foobar.pdf

will collar strip, warp, format change to Geotiff and dither to 8-bit color.
The output will be foobar.tif.

Unfortunately, I've found that some geopdfs contain INCORRECT specifications
of their own neatlines --- these GeoPDFs say that the neatline is the same
as the entire image, rather than the boundary of the map data itself.  There's
nothing to be done about that other than to hand-craft an FGD file with the
lat/lon of the north, south, east, and west neatlines.  But many GeoPDFs
have correct specifiers, and the output of geopdf2gtiff.pl will be precisely
a geotiff that can be used in Xastir with a minimum of fuss.

It seems that the most recent GeoPDFs downloadable from USGS are the ones 
with the bad neatlines --- the "US Topo" product that has contour lines
and street maps overlaid on aerial photos.  The older topo products in 
GeoPDF form (i.e. those that used to be distributed in GeoTIFF format)
all seem to have good neatlines in the small sample I've checked.

On another note, sourceforge seems to have busted our "email CVS commit notices"
feature, as commits now complain about a non-existent "/bin/mail" and no 
mail notices go out.  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide
 stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork." - Edward Abbey