At 10:46 AM 10/1/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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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
Brian, unfortunately, didn't get it, why his "solution" was utterly
inadequate. Given that it appears that, for at least some of the
papers, searchable text PDF already exists (I pointed to the archive
on newenergytimes.com), the essential barrier would be lack of
explicit permission to host those papers in that format.
An alternative would have been for the text to be converted to a file
as he proposed, and then for Schwartz would approve it. It seems
Schwarz did suggest this was acceptable, but ... who was to do the
substantial work? Jed could do it, if he were inclined. I could
easily see, from the history, why he wasn't willing to do that on
spec. He could put in a lot of work and get nothing, and it's not
like he gains a great deal by having another paper to host. Sometimes
he'll do the work, if he has time. Sometimes he doesn't have time, I'm sure.
The difficulty of this shows that something other than ordinary
technological obstacles is at work. One factor that is obvious is
ready assumption of bad faith; when something fails, it must be
because the other side wants it to fail. In a situation like this, I
try to focus on results, dealing with technological obstacles one at
a time. At a certain point I would give up, when it has become clear
to me that, if the other party wanted to resolve the problem, they
have easy and ready means to do so. I won't jump through hoops beyond
that point.
Schwarz could cut through this mess immediately: here, explicitly and
plainly give Rothwell permission to reproduce the articles which
exist as either PDF or iamge-over-text PDF (I can't tell which they
are) on newenergytimes.com). Or explicitly give Rothwell permission
to convert the hosted HTML text to PDF, submitting it for approval,
assuming that the HTML isn't itself largely in image format. All of
Rothwell's explanations make sense to me as to why he doesn't want to
host pure image, or image-with-abstract-only, they make sense to me
as a reader and user of the library, and they make sense to me as a
host of content. And if you keep making the same CDs with the same
CD-writer, they may still be unreadable with another specific one. I
don't know about "one out of three," but I do know that
interoperability failure is common, and could thus happen several
times in a row, even if more than one CD writer were used.
Someone else who would like to see Schwarz's papers hosted on
lenr-canr.org could assist in the conversion. If I had anything like
the time necessary, I might try it. But I don't.
