Leveraging your GIS as a Collaborative Platform

The U.S. Army's use of ESRI software for GeoPDF production

—Ray Caputo, US Army Geospatial Center

The U.S. Army Geospatial Center's [AGC] GeoPDF Project has implemented a third party extension for export and import of the GeoPDF file format within ArcGIS. The use of these two tools plus the new ArcGIS native PDF Map export tool gives the Army the ability to produce better "looking" mission specific products that are easier to view by the non-mappers in the Army. These files created using ESRI tools and extensions will give all soldiers the geospatial information they need to make better battlefield decisions.

AGC has had a hand in helping to produce 33,000 standard NGA map sheets & converting almost 60,000 USGS Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) files GeoPDFs. AGC also is producing their Urban Tactical Planners (UTP), Engineering Route Studies, Urban Water Graphics, BuckEye Mapbooks, Country Overviews and Cultural Maps in the GeoPDF format. Work on converting all NGA's Arc Digital Raster Graphics (ADRG) and Controlled Image Base (CIB) into GeoPDFs is in the very near future.