I purchased the latest version of the OmniPage OCR program and used
it to generate new versions of the EPRI ICCF-4 books:
EPRI. Proceedings: Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion
Volume 1: Plenary Session Papers, TR-104188-V1. 1994. Lahaina, Maui,
Hawaii: Electric Power Research Institute.
Vols. 1 - 4
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceeding.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedinga.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedingb.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedingc.pdf
I have been using ABBYY Fine Reader, but I learned that OmniPage now
produces much smaller Acrobat files than ABBYY. For example, the size
of volume 4 (the biggest) is:
Original EPRI version 48 MB
ABBYY version 26 MB
OmniPage version 8 MB
Unfortunately, the user interface to this program is dreadful. I used
it years ago and it is just as bad as it was back then. So I will
only use this for the gigantic Image Acrobat files from EPRI and
other Large Institutions that Do Not Know How to Preserve
Information. Really, they don't! The ENEA, EPRI, the Navy, BARC and
many others in this field have made amateur mistakes from day one.
They casually throw away digital data and printed original copies,
and keep only second-generation Xerographic copies. They did this
back in 1994, long after word processors and scanners were common. It
is a disgrace.
Look at p. 41 of Vol. 2 to see what I mean:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedinga.pdf
When I was going through the books I discovered some upside-down
pages; one duplicate page (which also in the original paper book from
EPRI -- which I have here); and several pages from a completely
unrelated document about nuclear reactors that someone left in the
scanning machine (which was not in the paper book -- see EPRI's scan
of Vol. 2, pages 68 - 65). I deleted this stuff. That's sloppy work at EPRI.
I have mixed feelings about the ICCF-4 books. There are some
excellent papers in them but also a lot of embarrassing junk. It may
be politically bad to reveal this stuff but I figure the reputation
of cold fusion couldn't be any worse than it is already, and there
may be some gold hidden in the dross. Most of the poorly presented,
amateur-looking papers are over my head, especially the speculative
theory papers. But some of the hand-written and faxed papers from
BARC probably have good information. I with those people had taken a
little more trouble to make a professional presentation. At least
they could have hired someone to type the papers. See, for example,
Vol. 2, pages 224 - 248:
Further Studies on Excess Heat Generation in Ni - H2O Electrolytic Cells
Really sloppy. The figures and text are cut off at the edges in the
original printed book as well as here. People will probably judge a
book by its cover and ignore this, and that's a darn shame. Plus, it
is hand written and not recognizable with the OCR program, so Google
will not hear about it. I seriously considered typing it myself, but
I decided the book itself is something of an historical artifact, and
should be presented as is. Besides, as far as I know these results
could not be replicated and Srinivasan has more or less given up on
them. (I think that's what he told me, but I will check.)
I do not want to think of LENR-CANR as a historic repository or a
museum of dead papers from a defunct field, but unfortunately, to a
large extent, that's what it is.
- Jed
