Yes, GIS solutions are the elephant in the room on this question. While the patron is a legit university-affiliated emeritus scholar, I resist opening that can of worms, as it could snowball into endless work. (I'm still haunted by past such scenarios with other patrons)

I was hoping for an easy answer of finding the missing website they remember tripping across a month ago, and will call Census on Monday to see about that.

If it comes to GIS, I'll couch it as 'you could hire a gis student or consultant to....' Actually,... pointing to our intro to QGIS videos is a good idea, the patron seems fairly self starting and might like learning new tricks.

Kww

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________________________________
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2022 9:06:12 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>; Weessies, Kathleen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: One gigantic census tract map? Stitching PDFs?

Is there anyone on your campus with an Arcmap or ArcPro license?

Joe McCollum
 Computer Scientist
Forest Inventory and Analysis
Knoxville TN

---------- Original Message ----------
From: "Weessies, Kathleen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: One gigantic census tract map? Stitching PDFs?
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2022 18:23:06 +0000


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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/PL20/st17_il/censustract_maps/__;!!HXCxUKc!yK4QLy2h6B6tajAnh_m2YtPKYYMvAsG4C9tncuFE5XvF4YUGgikyG5t_3CtFO2ipo8BCKhjpl_E1NlM$> 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

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517-884-0849