Geospatial registration and coordinate system transformations

The geolocation tool (and hence the geoTIFF automatic interpreter) supports PSAD56, and so the geolocation tool (GLT) can either report in native PSAD (leaving the datum transform box blank when georegistering the map) or transcode to WGS84, which roughly speaking shunts positions by about 250m. You can pick the GLT's display mode from Acrobat's general preferences, and you can even have both WGS and PSAD on display at the same time.

As a test I registered a dummy map, and the transcoding worked OK as far as I can see.

I'm still not having success. I come from a GIS background where the PSAD56 coordinate system includes a zone designation. In Acrobat I do not have that option. I'm working in 19 South and northings are positive whereas my Acrobat document reads correct lat-long but shows a negative northing off by 1000000s of meters and eastings off by 100000s of meters. I selected PSAD as the projection and left transform blank as you suggested. I found an older geotiff produced from MapInfo that I imported with correct PSAD 19S coordinates. ???

GeoTIFFs support full zoning on PSAD56, but the pulldown selections in Acrobat are what they are - you can't add or edit entries - so the old geoTIFF is just registering against the offsets Acrobat finds in the file header, but you can't manually register a map with the crosshair tool against a projection that's not on Acrobat's list. The GLT and measure tools can handle any projection you can throw at them, but it's the throwing part which gets tricky - as the geospatial toolset is there for a (careful voice) partner-specific reason, it pretty much assumes that you'll be working on a pre-registered PDF or a geoTIFF rather than pinning the PDF inside Acrobat.

Depends on the nature of your map, but if you can't turn it to geoTIFF and import it (vector art, etc), one hack of an option is to create a plain white geoTIFF with the same bounds and projection as your map, convert that to PDF then dump the real map on top as a PDF layer - the tools will see through to the "fake" map and whatever projection it happens to use. That's also the only way to get a shapefile stack into a PDF without a genuine base map underneath.

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately, I'm using ArcGIS 9.1, which does not make Geotiffs that Acrobat 9 can read, even after installing ESRI patches specific to Geotiffs and rasters. I'm no longer with the company that used MapInfo, which for some reason is able to make a Geotiff that Acobat can read.

You could try bouncing the geoTIFF that ArcGIS produces through something else (Quantum, etc.) or use the free listgeo win32-GUI tools program from the geoTIFF project website - http://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/ - to re-tag the file with a header that Acrobat will accept (listgeo button to drag them out for editing, geotiffcp button to put them back). We use it to re-tag files after editing in Photoshop.

You can of course pull the header from the old, working geoTIFF and inspect the differences to see what's not being accepted in the ArcGIS versions - be curious to see a comparison if you could post the header text here.

Oof - that explains it then - no projections/datums in the ArcGIS version, which means it's not even halfway to being a valid geoTIFF. Good job you knew the projection as it could have been anything with a header like that.

Yellow stone diesel parts plant is one of the leading manufacturers
of engine parts, in particular diesel fuel injection system
accessories for replacement, such as Fuel injection Nozzle, Plunger and
Delivery valve, ETC In south of china .

for more detail please visit our website : www.yellowstonediesel.com
www.dieselinjection.cn

Yellow stone diesel parts plant was founded in 1997.Over the years,
Yellow stone has grown and gained a reputation for producing
high quality products and delivering them on time.

105015-5860
105015-5860
105015-5940
0 433 171 134
0 433 171 137
0 433 171 146
5611065 H60S30A538
5611650 BDL110S6133
5611735 BDL110S6267
6801082 6801082
6801087 6801087
6801088 6801088
DN10PDN130
DN0PDN121
HL176S27D525P2
2418455518 2455-518
2418455714 2455-714
9401087506 9087-506
134151-4120 P121
134151-4920 P129
134151-6420 P143
NOZZLE DENSO 093400-7690 DN10PDN129
NOZZLE DENSO 093400-7700 DN10PDN130
NOZZLE DENSO 093400-8220 DN0PDN121
131110-9320 131110-9420 131160-0320