Dificulty making acurate legable custom maps.

[Sqiurly505]

First off, forgive me if I am asking a dump question. I am new to this, but find maps to be very fascinating.  I am attempting to make custom maps(to use on Garmin Oregon450) from two pdf maps from shasta trinity forest visitor maps. I tried to post a link to the pages where the maps are, but i guess i am not allowed to post links. I have g rastor, but these maps don't have any geo data and do not seem to convert to .tiff's through g rastor pdf tool correctly. So i found a different program to convert the pdf's to tiff's so i could overlay them onto google earth. i was successful in creating custom maps through google earth, but am not very happy with the quality(i can barely read the road names ect., not to mention I need to break the file up with g rastor so it displays correctly on my gps). I guess what i am asking, is there a better way to convert these to raster maps?(as far as converting pdf to tiff and also orientating the map to the proper coordinates when the pdf files does not have the correct properties? the coordinates are printed on the maps. is there a way to geo reference these maps in g-rastor? i would be great if someone could give be a step by step example of how to do this efficiently and accurately if it is possible. If you read this, thank you for you time and any help or advise is appreciated.

[leszekp]

If you check the help file for G-Raster, it has a link to a page that lists a whole bunch of programs that can georeference an image and convert it into a GeoTiff or similar format that G-Raster can use directly; you cannot do this directly in G-Raster. As you've found, the GeoPDF to GeoTiff convertor only works correctly on GeoPDF files. I use PDFCreator to export PDF files in TIFF format; if you look in the options section, you can increase the dpi of the output, which might improve the output quality.

The FS raster gateway has a site with links to GeoTiffs for most of the National Forests in the US; you might take a look to see if the maps you want are there (looks like they have two maps for Shasta-Trinity). I've run several of these through G-Raster successfully.

http://fsgeodata.fs.fed.us/visitormaps/