Love thy PDF map: mappery improves PDF map browsing

Adobe’s PDF is a great file format for highly detailed maps and its vector qualities scale lines and text impressively. As a result, a lot of the best maps out there are in the PDF format. However, PDF maps are difficult to find and view quickly. No known website currently makes this easy.

To address this problem, mappery now automatically generates thumbnails of PDF maps.  This allows quick and easy browsing of all PDF maps in the mappery collection. Never again will you have to click and load a big PDF map just to get a sense of what it is… just browse around in mappery and get a quick visual flavor of multitudes of PDFs.  This was a total pet peeve for me; look for other new features soon.

To illustrate the improvement, here’s what thumbnails for PDF maps in mappery used to look like vs. what you can see now: