Unless there are other details on the PDF sheets he needs, I'd suggest your patron look into learning just a little GIS (QGIS) so he can make his own county maps from census GIS data.

https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/

https://data2.nhgis.org/main



David Medeiros

Geospatial Reference & Instruction Specialist

Stanford Geospatial Center

650.561.5294

@mapbliss


SGC website: gis.stanford.edu

GIS cartography: bit.ly/giscart<http://bit.ly/giscart><http://bit.ly/giscart>

GIS email list: bit.ly/GISlist


________________________________
From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Weessies, Kathleen <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2022 11:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: One gigantic census tract map? Stitching PDFs?


A patron came into the map library today wanting one giant PDF that shows the 2020 census tracts of a county.  Starting with Cook County, Illinois. The usual Census website<https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/PL20/st17_il/censustract_maps/> reference maps carve Cook County into 6 large PDFs - thankfully all at the same scale. His fallback plan that he wants to avoid is taking the time to slice off the margins of each sheet and forcing the PDFs together into one giant PDF file. But he swears about a month ago he tripped across a website (which he can’t find now) that allowed him to select several sheets and the website stitched them together for him.



Does this sound familiar?



He cringes at his next county of interest, Los Angeles County, because the many PDF sheets were created at varying scales and won’t abut each other nicely at all without a whole lot of digital tomfoolery.



Thank you for considering,



Kathleen Weessies

Social Sciences Coordinator; Head, Map Library

Michigan State University

[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

517-884-0849