April 2006
There has been some discussion on the Road Running Technical Council bulletin board regarding submission and storage of course maps as electronic files. Currently, course maps submitted on paper to the course registrar. The registrar scans the maps (converting them to electronic files) and uploads thos files to the map database.
In order to display on the the USATF web site, maps must be submitted with the following specifications:
PNG is the ideal format for displaying the maps on the USATF web site. Submitting a course map to the registrar as a PNG file would avoid a conversion. It would make sense to keep the map as a PNG file if the map went directly from the measurer to the registrar, without being used elsewhere.
In practice, the measurer would create the course map and send it to the race director for review. Once, corrections have been made, the map would be sent to the race director, to the state certifier for review, the regional certifier, the registrar and eventually to the USATF web site.
While the PNG format has been standardized and is readable in most browsers, the Portable Document Format (PDF) is still the de facto standard for electronic documents and forms exchange. I would like to see course maps circulated as PDF files. Before the course maps are posted to the web site, they may be converted to PNG files.
I took one of my PDF course maps and converted it to directly PNG format. I saved the first PNG file with the original colors, the second PNG file has 8 bit color and the third PNG has 4 shades of gray. Here are the files:
| File Type | File size | Width | Height | Bits Per Pixel | Comments |
| Portable Document Format | 314 KB |
3178 |
2445 |
24 |
color |
| Portable Network Graphics | 194KB |
3178 |
2445 |
24 |
color |
| Portable Network Graphics | 131KB |
3178 |
2445 |
8 |
color |
| Portable Network Graphics | 148 KB |
3178 |
2445 |
8 |
black & white / grayscale |
I converted the PDF file using the free software: XnView v1.82.4 and AFPL Ghostscript 8.53. In XnView, in the Options, I had to change the Read | Postscript | DPI from 72 to 300.
Additional info:
