User:Cburnett/airport diagrams

The Federal Aviation Administration provides airport diagrams in PDF but PDFs are not displayable on wikipedia. This necessitates conversion to an image format.

Converting to a raster-based image is pretty easy but conversion to vector-based is a tad trickier (direct PDF -> SVG utilities seem to be very few and far between). This is how I converted the PDF into SVG under Linux:

1. Head to http://www.naco.faa.gov/index.asp?xml=naco/online/d_tpp
2. Click on the "digital - Terminal Procedures (XXXX)" link (the XXXX changes along with the effective and ending dates)
3. Once there, enter in the ICAO code or whatever means you know to find the airport
4. Returned should be a list of PDFs pertaining to this airport
5. Find the "AIRPORT DIAGRAM" and download the PDF
6. Based on what I learned here Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics/How to draw SVG circuits using Xcircuit run the following commands
   1. pdftops 00117AD.PDF (pdftops is apart of poppler)
   2. eps2eps -dNOCACHE 00117AD.ps 00117AD-2.ps (eps2eps is apart of ghostscript-gpl)
   3. ps2epsi 00117AD-2.ps 00117AD.ps (ps2epsi (ps2epsi is apart of ghostscript-gpl)
   4. rm -f 00117AD-2.ps
   5. pstoedit -f sk 00117AD.ps 00117AD.sk (pstoedit is its own package)
   6. skconvert 00117AD.sk 00117AD.svg (skconvert is apart of skencil)

Once you do that, you have converted the PDF to an SVG without rasterizing it. However, there is a cost: text. All of the text has been converted to paths to look like text. To convert the text:

1. Open the SVG in, say, Inkscape
2. I found the following fonts to be comparable:
   • Trebuchet MS
   • URW Gothic L
3. Spend a couple hours replacing all text

See the following for an example:

Des Moines International Airport (IATA: DSM; ICAO: KDSM)