Dr. Mitchell Swartz wrote:
For those interested, I have been working with Dr. Brian Josephson
many months, as an experiment, sending some of the papers by
email to Jed, cc to Brian.
The fact is: Brian and the others received them.
Brian encouraged Jed to put them up on his site, but Jed insisted
he edit them. Thereafter, Jed always found a "problem".
I insisted they be converted to text Acrobat format. I did not
propose to change the content at all. Here are some of the letters
from that exchange. I normally do not disclose this sort of thing,
but I shall make an exception.
As I said here the other day, authors who do not wish to provide the
papers in text Acrobat format are invited to take a hike. Anyone who
finds this requirement onerous or unfair is invited to run your own
damn web site. Yesterday I learned that Swartz has uploaded some of
his own papers to his own site in HTML text format, for crying out
loud. Why should he object to text Acrobat format?!? This makes zero sense.
So far, with ~1000 papers uploaded, only one author has objected to
the format and organization of LENR-CANR.org: Swartz.
By the way, converting from HTML text to Acrobat text takes exactly
as much time as it takes to print the document. I have a print driver
that redirects the output to an Acrobat file. It's a piece of cake.
As readers here know, lately I have bent the standards to allow
image-over-text format, because I got books in that format hundreds
of pages long, such as the NSF/EPRI proceedings. This is not the same
as image Acrobat format. I spent about a month correcting the
underlying text in those books. There are still errors,
unfortunately. (The text is "underlying" or "hidden" you might say.
You can do a Control-F to find it, and Google finds it.)
- Jed
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FROM Swartz, 11 Jun 2006
Brian, and Jed:
Previously, I wrote:
"Our papers could be available in pdf image format, as I have stated before
if: 1) we are satisfied with the image quality,
2) we have the opportunity to check each prior to them being
made available, and
3) there is no editing of the paper after we ok the pdf image.
Previously, we have given pdf image papers to Jed of several
papers, but he was wanted to use
his OCR on them, and that is not acceptable at this point in time.
We will allow OCR of the abstracts which can then be re-added in a
non-image format
attached to the pdf-image papers, as long as 1, 2, and 3 above are used, and
we have opportunity to check the OCR'd abstract text.
In my experience, this use of pdf imaging creates a documents which is
a few hundred Kbytes to, at most, 2 megabytes if there are lots of
graphic images
and photographs. That should take care of all the problems cited in
the missive below.
Hope that helps. Let me know if this is acceptable."
If this is acceptable, I will ask Alan to scan the CAM paper into
pdf-image and port
the pdf-image paper to Jed. I will be meeting with him shortly to
go over some
experiments now ongoing here. Let us know.
Mitchell
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FROM ME TO Swartz and Josephson 11 Jun 2006
Mitchell Swartz writes:
>"Our papers could be available in pdf image format, as I have stated before
>if: 1) we are satisfied with the image quality,
Image format is not good. It does not index properly so people cannot
find it; it is too big, and people have trouble reading it. It has to
be Acrobat text format. Only the figures and equations should be images.
Let me know if you want my assistance converting to text. My OCR
program is the best around.
- Jed
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FROM ME TO Swartz and Josephson 12 Jun 2006
Let me make it clear that I must insist on the text Acrobat format.
That is our standard, and it works well for both the readers and for
the mechanics of the web site. We have had great success distributing
papers smoothly and rapidly all over the world, at the rate of 20,000
to 30,000 per month lately. I am confident that I know what I am
doing, and I know what presentation format is called for.
Making the conversion is only a minor imposition on the author. So
far no author has complained. If you do not have time to make the
conversion now, please contact me when you have some free time and
you are ready to upload the paper. Let me know if you would like
assistance in the initial OCR phase. It should take you a day or two
per paper to prepare. If I were you, I would re-enter the equations
from scratch, and insert the best available graphs and other images.
But that is up to you. As long as the base format is Acrobat text,
the document will work with our system.
Of course the content and formatting of the document is entirely up to you.
- Jed
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--On 12 June 2006 00:25:39 -0400 Jed Rothwell
<[email protected]> wrote:
As long as the base format is Acrobat text, the document will work
with our system.
Fine! So start with the abstract in that format, and include the
rest of the paper, as scanned, as if it were graphics. Problem solved! Next?
Brian
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[I told Brian, no, sorry. No exceptions for any author.]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FROM ME TO Swartz and his coauthors 13 June 2006
. . . Brian Josephson asked me to enumerate the main reasons I insist
on the text Acrobat format. Here is what I told him:
1. It looks more professional and neat. Like it or not, thousands of
readers judge the quality of a paper or web site by neatness. They
will not even read a paper that looks messy. Since we know our
readers tend to be that way, we must strive to make a good impression on them.
2. Image files are difficult for many people to read, and large, and
unwieldy. Many of our readers in Russia, China, the Middle East and
elsewhere must use slow connections. Scientists in Iran and Russia
have such difficulty, they sometimes ask before a CD-ROM copy of the
system (which I am happy to provide).
3. Google and the other search tools will not properly index an image
Acrobat paper. The hybrid image-text format is even worse. Most of
our readers come via Google, Yahoo and the other search tools, so we
must make the papers visible to them, and correctly indexed.
4. They are compatible with tools used by disabled people, such as
voice output, vision enhancement, Braille output, and special cursor controls.
5. Text Acrobat files are compatible with electronic dictionaries and
translation tools. Many of our readers are outside of the US, and
many are not native speakers of English so I expect they use
electronic dictionaries to look up words, or they copy words or
phrases to Google. I often do this with papers in Japanese.
6. Text format makes it much easier to look up references and quote text.
7. Text format allows important electronic content enhancements such
as hyperlinks, contextual information, rejuvenation and so on. See:
http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex
I think these advantages far outweigh the minor imposition on the
authors, who must spend a few hours converting back into a machine
readable format. Of course it is best to preserve the original
machine readable files in the first place. If you happen to have the
files for these papers, I can probably read them, even if the format
is obsolete.
- Jed
