Another possible workflow is to use Acrobat DC Pro (a paid app that's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of software). According to Adobe, a GeoPDF, among several other geospatial file formats, can be directly imported. It will import shapefile data directly. See their webpage. I'm not an Acrobat subscriber other than the free Acrobat DC Reader. I'm speculating how this would work: 1. In QGIS, export two PDFs -- one for the full file and the other just containing a background or ne