What it does
Share is a PDF
I built something I'm genuinely excited about, and it started with a small, annoying problem: how do you share a note with someone who doesn't have the app?
The old answer was a .geojson file. Perfect for you — it's the real data, lossless, standard. Useless for your mom. She opens it and sees a wall of coordinates.
I could have made a "pretty" export that throws the data away, and a "real" export that throws the pretty away, and made you choose. Instead I asked a better question: what if it didn't have to be a choice?
One file, two layers
When you share a note, you get a PDF. Just a PDF — the most universal document there is. Your mom opens it on any phone, any computer, and sees a clean field report: a map with your route or your pins drawn on it, your photos, your words, the date and place. She reads it like a page. She doesn't need to know what GeoJSON is, or that your app exists.
But tucked inside that same PDF is the whole note — the original .geojson, byte-for-byte, plus every original photo, video, and voice memo, embedded as real file attachments. When someone with GeoJSONic opens that PDF, the app pulls the note back out, perfectly, and drops it into their journal. Nothing lost. Same coordinates, same media, same everything.
The document your mom reads and the data your app imports are the same file. You never choose between beautiful and lossless — you get both.
This isn't a hack. Embedding files inside a PDF is part of the standard (it's how archival PDF/A-3 works). I spent a full day proving the round-trip before I wrote a line of the feature: share a note, extract the embedded data with a completely separate tool, and confirm it came out identical to the original down to the last byte. It did.
It scales to your whole journal
Because the data streams into the file instead of loading all at once, this works for a single note and for a full backup that's gigabytes of video. Your entire journal becomes one self-describing PDF: a cover page with the stats, and every note and clip embedded inside, ready to restore. One file that is your life on a map — readable by anyone, owned by you.
Free to share, richer with Pro
There are two flavors, and both draw their map on Mapbox now. A free share is the slim version — your note, the route or pins drawn in, your photos, a one-line summary. The richer field report — stat boxes, splits, a satellite basemap, the full activity breakdown — rides along with Pro. Same PDF idea either way; Pro just goes deeper.
That's the through-line for everything I build: your stuff should be yours, portable, and readable without asking permission — including when you hand it to someone else. A PDF turned out to be the most honest way to do that. It's how sharing works today.