Giant PDF file + Palm = Disaster?

April 26, 2006 11:46 AM

How can I make this TTC transit system map [pdf 1.6mb] Palm TX friendly?

... without having to write a custom app of some kind, that is.

Can it be done? Creating a series of small jpgs might work, but the map is very large and I was hoping to be able to scroll and zoom.

Attempting to open the unaltered PDF with Acrobat Reader on the Palm crashes my TX and forces it to reboot. Is there a better PDF viewer in shareware or freeware capable of handling large, complicated files?

I know of other city mapping solutions, such as Mapopolis, but as a car-free transit rider an accurate route map is really important to me.

posted by onshi to computers & internet (12 comments total)

I don't have a direct answer for your question but when I used a Palm (5 years ago) there was a piece of software for the OS that had subway maps from around the world. It was free and you could punch in two stops and it would tell you the time to travel between them. Unfortuanately, I don't recall the title, but perhaps searching at the Palm shareware sites or Brighthand or something would turn it up. For some reason I think the software had the word Go or Express in it and it was originally made for europe and other people sent in maps from their cities.
posted by dobbs at 12:35 PM on April 26, 2006

Did you try it with PalmPDF? I could view it on my T|X -- and scroll around a little -- but it took an inconveniently long time to render. But if you could shave any of the file off, maybe PalmPDF will work better for you. Too bad the other map programs don't cut it.
posted by theredpen at 12:41 PM on April 26, 2006

You might try the TTC maps on the site formerly known as ipodsubwaymaps.com.
posted by winston at 12:47 PM on April 26, 2006

theredpen: In PalmPDF I can open and scroll the file, but it will only appear in greyscale mode... when I try to view it in colour, it switches to black-and-white.

The subway maps are neat, but the underground system here is fairly spartan and memorable; it's the more far-flung bus and streetcar routes that force me to pull out a map now and again.
posted by onshi at 1:06 PM on April 26, 2006

TTC schedule for Palm (last updated March 6, 2006)
posted by purephase at 1:28 PM on April 26, 2006

There's also TUBE Toronto. I've never tried either of them, but TTCRider links to the site I mentioned in my first post.
posted by purephase at 1:31 PM on April 26, 2006

Actually it was only greyscale for me, too, now that you mention it. Sorry that wasn't much help. I got excited when it opened instead of crashing immediately.
posted by theredpen at 1:37 PM on April 26, 2006

Flatten it into a jpeg at a decent resolution so you can zoom in to an acceptable level of detail. The raster file may be bigger, but it will be easier for the device to handle. There are a ton of paths on that map file and it will be tough to render that on a palm. I've been putting tons of maps on my Nokia 770 and I've stopped using PDF cause it tends to choke mobile devices.
posted by lovejones at 3:55 PM on April 26, 2006

http://www.nanika.net/Metro

This is the program dobb mentioned. Its a great program.

I don't know much about the pdf file, sorry.
posted by chrispy108 at 4:06 PM on April 26, 2006

The PDF file is password protected! If I try to open it in Photoshop (to export to TIFF to fiddle with), I get asked for a password... and I cannot save it as a raster file of any kind from within Acrobat ("insufficient permissions for image extraction").

Thanks a lot, freaking public-sector transit commission, for locking me out of the abilitiy to make your products more useful to myself and others.

Any suggestions? I really, really want to avoid doing dozens of screen captures to get around this BS.
posted by onshi at 1:24 PM on April 27, 2006

The file does not seem to be protected against printing. If you print it to PDF Writer, Acrobat Distiller, etc., you can create a PDF file that doesn't have the password restriction (and which won't be as editable as the original, but that might not be a problem in this case).
posted by winston at 6:33 PM on April 27, 2006

Sadly, when I try to print to a PDF, it gives me an error message saying I don't have the right permissions to "redistill" the file.
posted by onshi at 7:26 AM on April 28, 2006