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 WikiProject Electronics/How to draw SVG circuits using Xcircuit run the following commands
 * 7)   (pdftops is apart of poppler)
 * 8)   (eps2eps is apart of ghostscript-gpl)
 * 9)   (ps2epsi (ps2epsi is apart of ghostscript-gpl)
 * 10)   (pstoedit is its own package)
 * 11)   (skconvert is apart of skencil)
 * 1)   (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:
 * 3) * Trebuchet MS
 * 4) * URW Gothic L
 * 5) Spend a couple hours replacing all text

See the following for an example:
 * [[Image:Airport diagram DSM.svg|750px|thumb|left|[[Des Moines International Airport]] (IATA: DSM; ICAO: KDSM)]]