There are five NGA Pilot Chart sets (North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific and Indian Oceans).  Each set includes one chart for each month of the year.

Until recently the NGA Pilot Charts were available only on paper and in a large format booklet about the same size as the Maptech ChartKits many of us use for coastal navigation.  The problem with the paper Pilot Charts is that they are a little clumsy to work with and take up a lot of space for something you might use at most once or twice each year.  Also most cruising sailors have adapted to one extent or another to electronic navigation using a chart plotter.  Many of us like to use the chart plotter as one of our route planning tools and would like to be able to integrate the information on a Pilot Chart with those tools.

A few years ago NGA published the Pilot Chart sets (and many other publications) in Adobe PDF format and made them available for download from the Internet.  So now we can get the charts electronically, but unless you have Adobe Acrobat or some other publishing software for PDF files you can only browse them.  You can't draw routes on them and Adobe Reader is not really designed for large format graphical documents such as the Pilot Charts.

Those of use who use navigational software on our PCs have a tool that was designed to work with these kinds of charts, but few if any of those software packages can work with native PDF files.  Most chart plotting software designed for raster charts have the capability to import a chart image in one or more of the standard graphic file formats (JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, etc.).  So if we could only get the pilot charts into one of those formats we could manipulate the Pilot Charts with our chart plotting software.

Fortunately the PDF files provided by NGA allow you to do just that.  In setting up the PDF files NGA allows the user to select and extract portions (or all) of each page of Pilot Chart sets.

Following is a description of how I import Pilot Charts into the Fugawi software.  Most other raster chart plotting software packages also have this capability, only the specific process steps will differ.  The first step no matter what chart plotting software is used, is to get the chart out of the PDF format and into one of the graphic formats supported by the plotting software.

Of course if you own Adobe Acrobat you probably don't need the first two steps.  I assume Acrobat will allow you to export directly to a standard graphic file format.

1. Use the Snap Shot Tool in Adobe Reader to select one complete or partial chart and copy it to the Windows Clipboard
2. Using a graphic software package (e.g., Adobe PhotoShop) paste the contents of the clipboard into a blank graphic and save it in one of the file formats supported by your chart plotting software.
3. Import and calibrate the newly created chart file into your chart plotting software package.

I've added an alternative to the first two steps: Using a screen capture tool, such as SangIT, to copy the chart to a graphic file. 

I've provided some detail on these steps below.

The Pilot Chart PDF documents were generated at the same resolution as the paper images, which is much greater than almost any computer screen resolution.  The zoom level in Adobe Reader refers to the size of your display screen not the base resolution of the document.  So the higher you  set the zoom value before you do the extract, the greater the resolution of the resultant chart.  There is an effective limit to how high you can set the zoom level in Adobe Reader, which is apparent when the screen image produced by Reader gets that over-zoomed fuzziness. You cannot exceed the resolution of the original document that was scanned into the PDF file.  If you do it will just look like all those other raster charts you over-zoomed with your chart plotting software.  To get the maximum zoom level possible, keep zooming in until the image starts to get fuzzy, then zoom back out until it is in focus once again.  That is your maximum zoom level for extraction.

On my computer I have found that 200% is the most effective zoom level and 400% is the upper limit of what I can extract.

Using a high zoom value makes the selection process a little more cumbersome as it requires panning the screen from the upper left corner (screen above) to the lower right corner (screen on the right).

There is a message box on the screen generated by Adobe Reader that says the selected portion of the document has been copied to the Clipboard.  Most people, myself included, would click on the "Don't Show This Message Again" box and suppress this message box.  I left it in for the purpose of clarity in the screen capture.

That's all there is to put the entire chart image on the Clipboard.

You can use higher zoom levels and get a higher resolution chart, but it may significantly slow down the process depending on the speed of your CPU and the amount of memory available on your system.

For this step I have used Adobe PhotoShop 5.0 LTE, a Lite version of an old and unsupported level of this software.  It is what I have and I use it for most of my work with graphic files.  Someday I'll have to upgrade to the latest version. 

In the screen on the right I have selected New from the File menu to create a blank image in Photoshop.

Without this feature you may have to make the new image oversized and crop it once the image is pasted.

In the screen above, PhotoShop provides a recommended size for the New file, which is exactly the dimensions of the graphic I copied onto the Clipboard using Adobe Reader.

Notice that it has stored the chart image in Layer 1 of the PhotoShop graphic file.  This makes the current format of the chart unique to PhotoShop and it cannot be saved in a industry standard format until this formatting has been removed.

In the screen capture I have started the chart calibration, which is the process by which Fugawi imports a graphic file and turns it into a navigation chart.

I am running Fugawi 4.xx, if you are running an earlier or later version the menus may be different, but the basic process hasn't changed.

When you extract a chart image for import into Fugawi it is not necessary to extract the entire image of the chart; however, it is helpful to get at least one horizontal and one vertical boundary of the chart so you can read the values for the latitude and longitude lines used to calibrate the chart.

Then click next twice and the chart image has been calibrated and is ready to be imported into Fugawi.

Fugawi opens a chart save window which allows you to specify the name of the chart and where in the Fugawi chart library to store the new chart.

So the Pilot Charts have a very limited use in the chart plotter.  They can be used to validate or refine a navigational strategy developed from conventional navigation charts.  Once the voyage begins the real weather conditions should determine how you implement that strategy, not the information on these charts. 

Given the limited use that can and should be made of these charts with a chart plotting software package, many will find the process I described above to be too much effort for a very small gain, and I would not argue different.  I have gone through the effort to calibrate the North Atlantic Pilot Charts in Fugawi.  Consequently any time I want to compare a voyage I am contemplating with Climatology data I can do that in a few seconds.  I also do not need to provide space (other than a few 100 MBytes on a hard drive) for the paper charts.

Of course the real reason I have imported these charts into Fugawi is because I wanted to see how it could be done.  Once accomplished I could see some value in having done so, but that was not the reason I started down this path.