Open To Suggestion

[KadeFoster]

Hey all,

I have a project that i am working on and i am slowly chipping away by doing little bits at a time. I am looking for suggestions on how to automate a process with access that i have to do manually along side using my DB.

Below is a map, each one of those squares i have to inspect, and then fill out a report for each square. What i want to do is somehow change the colour of each square automatically when i process the inspection. Each square has a unique code using the coordinates i.e. 99CR68. There are about 80 or so squares per map. The maps are in pdf format. There is over 100k squares, from all the maps.

Currently we have those blue squares in the boxes (comments in Adobe DC) and when i have completed the inspection, i go into Adobe DC and change the colour of the square. The Green Xs are just from me writing on it in MS Edge.

Idea 1: Some how use adobe to put a shape in each box if I could address each square. Create like an image map in there some how. Want Access to automate this.

Idea 2. Convert the map PDF to an image then use Illustrator/In Design to create a template overlay for the map. Then slice all the squares up to individual images, to create an image map, store all the files locations info in a table. Then some how colour each image with like Green at 50% opacity. Not sure if access could do this.

Is this possible?

Suggestions welcome.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I have no experience in using Adobe's abilities, but I can still address the concepts a bit. If you REALLY want to do this, you need to do one of two things. Either

(a) break up the map into square elements which you then reassemble to form the map as a whole. Then you can manipulate the squares as entities and play with their color properties as individual entities.

(b) figure out the coordinates so you can place rectangles to overlay the squares and color in the rectangle background fill (.BackColor) to have a percentage fill of a specific color and with transparency.

But how you do that using Adobe? Damned if I know. I do know that you might have issues with the layout because you need Access to use its power of automation on an image handler, which means you need the .DLL files that let you grab and diddle with map segments. If you don't have any libraries available to Access that have that ability, you are already dead in the water.

 

[CarlettoFed]

Is the size of the image within the PDF file always the same?
Does that grid of black lines always appear in the image?

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I saw an example application in MS Access many years ago which allows you display a map in a form (image), click on different locations of that map and show information about that location. That's what drew me to your question.

However I'm convinced MS Access is a non-starter for the manipulation of the images, you need some other programme. Where MS Access may be useful is for handling the data aspect.

My guess is a better option would be to use a programming language like python. With that in mind I did a quick search of the web and discovered this link:-

Extract all Images from PDF with Python, and retain their transparency

I see a number of solutions on the web and here for extracting images from a PDF with PyMuPDF, PyPDF2, and others, but none them successfully retain transparency information, are using deprecated c...

stackoverflow.com

which reveals some interesting information about the construction of PDF documents (the images within).

If you read the information in the link (I only performed a cursory examination of this information) I discovered immediately that PDF is not designed for this sort of thing, it is designed to be something that is easily printed out on various printers, hence some of the features of PDF, like "transparency" was an afterthought. This might be an impediment to your idea!

 

[bastanu]

Why not just save the map as a jpg or png file and set it as the background image for a pop-up form; use Docmd.MoveSize to control its size and position in the open event and add text box controls bound to a table holding your coordinates (or even better combo boxes that can display your comments but still be bound to the coordinates field). From there you can play with the bàckcolour, forecolour or other properties as needed.
Cheers,

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The only issue there is the limit of objects you can place in a form and the size limit of a form. If you had a 3rd party mapping program that exposed its internals to automation, that would be ideal. But sadly, I can't help there because I never worked with that kind of mapping. All of my maps were virtual and static. Plus never displayed, only plotted on a plotter.

 

[CJ_London]

Might be worth looking at Google maps or earth. isladogs demoed something recently

 

[KadeFoster]

Is the size of the image within the PDF file always the same?
Does that grid of black lines always appear in the image?

- Unfortunately i cannot post a full image as i would probably get in trouble. But essentially its a large map with coordinates around top and sides, with a border and title block.

- The grid lines are on the pdf/image, and thats how i plan to break the image up. Along those lines.

 

[KadeFoster]

Why not just save the map as a jpg or png file and set it as the background image for a pop-up form; use Docmd.MoveSize to control its size and position in the open event and add text box controls bound to a table holding your coordinates (or even better combo boxes that can display your comments but still be bound to the coordinates field). From there you can play with the bàckcolour, forecolour or other properties as needed.
Cheers,

That sounds like not a bad idea, i would think the image would be reasonable in size. Over lay a table on top of the image and just address each cell, fill each cell with a colour. I guess i could then just export it as a pdf, so then some one to use the map with the colours overlayed from the cells.

Was that your line of thinking ?

 

[isladogs]

As @CJ_London mentioned, I've done a lot of work with maps in Access.
You can read my article :

Annotate Google Maps

The first article in a series which demonstrates ways of 'annotating' downloaded maps to personalise these for your clients. Features include the use of marker points, lines, circles & boundary shapes, nearby places and styles. All features are added as new map layers. An example app is provided.

www.isladogs.co.uk

However, I really wouldn't spend time doing this myself
Suggest you look at picoware Maps for Microsoft Access which may well be able to do what you need

picoware gmbh - picoware Maps for Microsoft Access (ab 2003 / 32 und 64 Bit)

www.picoware.de

Its a commercial product but I've tried it and its very impressive.
In fact, I was so impressed, I've lined up the author Thomas Pfoch to do a talk on this for Access Europe next year.

 

[KadeFoster]

As @CJ_London mentioned, I've done a lot of work with maps in Access.
You can read my article :

Annotate Google Maps

The first article in a series which demonstrates ways of 'annotating' downloaded maps to personalise these for your clients. Features include the use of marker points, lines, circles & boundary shapes, nearby places and styles. All features are added as new map layers. An example app is provided.

www.isladogs.co.uk

However, I really wouldn't spend time doing this myself
Suggest you look at picoware Maps for Microsoft Access which may well be able to do what you need

picoware gmbh - picoware Maps for Microsoft Access (ab 2003 / 32 und 64 Bit)

www.picoware.de

Its a commercial product but I've tried it and its very impressive.
In fact, I was so impressed, I've lined up the author Thomas Pfoch to do a talk on this for Access Europe next year.

Awesome man I'll have a look. I am still relatively new to coding bout 6 months into this project, just trying to automate my job away lol.

Unfortunately the maps I am working with are not Google maps but underground mine plans. The engineers use a program called Deswik to generate the maps, and from what I just found they can slice them up. I just need to get them to make me a single level map so I can work out a solution. But I will definitely have a read.

My project to me seems big but to you gurus it would probably be easy. I post when i get stuck but try to work through the problems myself to get a solution. Sad thing is, I really don't know if my code is good lol but the project is functioning and well its being used as i develop it. The map part is just another piece of the puzzle.

 

[bastanu]

Colin's link looks great and would probably give you what you want and much more!

My idea was just a simplistic approach of using text boxes placed on top of the map image, having them bound to the coordinates for that map square and manipulating those.

Cheers,

 

[KadeFoster]

Colin's link looks great and would probably give you what you want and much more!

My idea was just a simplistic approach of using text boxes placed on top of the map image, having them bound to the coordinates for that map square and manipulating those.

Cheers,

Simple is good tho. I am a VBA noob.