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Reply to "Electronic map file size"

Gene, yes, I have spoken to John about this and he is all aboard with electronic submission. Like most of us, he prefers to deal with PDFs rather than PNGs.

As I write this, I am viewing, on another browser tab, videos of track meets on USATF.org. Do you have a good feeling for how much more server space and bandwidth these many streaming videos use than our puny little cache of on line maps? Since other parts of USATF.org seem to me to be working fine, what conclusions might we draw from the server issues you refer to?

You say the purpose of the site is "to have all courses show online". Yet, since some maps are scanned into the system at a 90-degree rotation, they show online poorly. This is on top of us using the wrong file type for our maps and certificates, which causes them to appear grainy, pixilated, or just plain washed-out. It seems to me no one would use these poor-quality images to advertise.

If we start handling our maps in the appropriate file format, not only will they print well, they will display just fine, Gene. As an example, check out this PDF posting on USATF.org for the Prefontaine Classic: [URL=www.runnerspace.com/download.php?file_id=21] . This is a PDF image that looks good on the USATF.org page, on my screen, and just peachy printed out in color.

I never send my clients to USATF.org for maps whenever there is any alternative for the reasons just mentioned. Yet, clients often seek information about the availability of multiple existing courses, hence their visits (or mine) to the site. Isn't this prominent among the reasons for maintaining these maps of courses we have entered into the public domain via our certification process? If we do not need to post good quality maps on line at all, If we simply list the course name, city, certification number, and expiration date without a map, how useful would the site be?

As for printing maps from USATF.org, my experiments at home scanning printed maps with the same process, e.g. <400 Kb PNGs, then re-printing, reveal a far higher-quality image than from USATF.org every time. With electronic submission and no excessive file size constraints, perhaps the scanning problems will cease to be an issue. I know I would not want to scan thousands of pages every year. This is a huge amount of work. Hopefully, we are now on track for scanning to become a thing of the past.

I always send PDFs of my maps to clients. They never have any issues viewing them, posting them on the Web, or printing them. I do not send them certificates unless they ask. In my 26 years of doing this, no one has ever asked me for a certificate.

Checks and balances considered, it seems to me as though our Web site for certification maps may be little more than an afterthought for some folks in authority at USATF based on the recent reports on the apparent inattention to our issues. I have to wonder how much better our system could be if some day our concerns rise to a level of relevance to them.
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