I have version 8.0.3. I don't see a way of exporting a georeferenced PDF map. Am I missing something?

Thanks

Nope. I believe Manifold 8 and 9 are missing something that QGIS, Global Mapper and ArcGIS can do readily. Your fallback is to export a GeoTIFF. Submit a suggestion to Manifold to include geospatial PDF export.

A "GeoPDF" as it is used most often is just an image saved in PDF format with coordinate system info. It's a way of taking images in GeoTIFF and other formats and saving them in a proprietary format that restricts the ability to use them for interchange. It's true that GeoPDF can save both vector and raster data in georeferenced form, but it seems that most often it's used for raster.

If you want to do that sort of thing there's nothing stopping you from taking a perfectly good GeoTIFF image saved by Manifold and converting it to GeoPDF. You can do that today, in moments.

I suppose because there are simple ways to force images into proprietary form and because GeoPDF as a proprietary format hasn't gotten much traction is why there have been near-zero requests to embed that capability within Manifold. Note from the Suggestions topic Manifold has no resistance to implementing new formats if that's what people want. Note also from that page that whether or not somebody else has implemented a format isn't one of the factors that matters.

Apparently, the other packages you cite all use GDAL to implement GeoPDF writing. That's a pretty big burden in terms of installation size, but if you don't mind that you can use GDAL to convert GeoTIFF to GeoPDF in moments. Here's the command line:

gdal_translate -of PDF yourinput.tif youroutput.pdf

Of course, if you like the way GDAL does it (which is the way it's done in Q, etc.,) you get into using proj for projection conversions. GDAL doesn't always pick up the right coordinate system from a GeoTIFF, so you can specify the one you want:

gdal_translate -of PDF -a_srs EPSG:32648 yourinput.tif youroutput.pdf

If you want something with less of a heavy footprint, you can just use an online GeoTIFF to GeoPDF converter, like https://mygeodata.cloud/converter/tiff-to-geopdf

I've just tried that and it works great. There are, of course, various complications in converting vector data to PDF for GeoPDF. But there if you want an interchange format it seems there already are many formats that can handle that.

However, if despite the ease of converting GeoTIFF to GeoPDF it's important to you to have an exporter built into Manifold, then read the Suggestions topic and follow the tips for advocacy. Given the lack of interest to date I don't think the chances Manifold would be willing to bloat up the installation package for such a rarely-used format are good, but if replacing a quick command line with a built in menu command is more important than other things, well, that's what suggestions are for.

Forgot to add, the command line to create a vector Geospatial PDF (which is not a GeoPDF but similar) is

gdal_translate -of PDF -co GEO_ENCODING=ISO32000 <input_vector_layer> <output_file.pdf>

GeoPDF is the proprietary TerraGo "georeferenced PDF". What GDAL creates is the supposedly open source "geospatial pdf". I write "supposedly" because PDF itself is an Adobe format, not an open format.

You could, of course embed a series of layers within a geoPDF. How that's done varies in other packages, in Esri's case it being unclear whether they use TerraGo or GDAL. It's also unclear the degree to which other packages decouple feature attributes from a true vector storage format or overlaid on a image.

My own take on this is that if you want something really simple to distribute to users, a better way to do all that is using an internet map server. Online maps are clearly dominating that space.

Seems like the value of PDF over tiff is that tiff can often require much higher resolution to make labels legible, often well beyond the needed background image resolution. Converting a Mfd tiff to PDF doesn't accomplish that. This file size reduction (plus the geo aspect) can be hugely helpful for many applications.

I suspect many users are like me and would like this but feel it is better to ask for the few things you'd really want, then send in a super long list that includes lower priority stuff. This is especially when your priority list is long and the many prior forum posts about why Mfd prefers relying on an external PDF creator through the print process.