You can download the current PDF report file here. This represents work in progress as of 1/05/09. Most of the text (especialy in sections 1.0 and 2.0) has been edited more than once, although it should still be considered a rought draft. The file looks OK to me rendered in both Adobe Reader 8.1.2 and Preview 4.1. The current file does not contain any inline images, for reasons which will be made clear below, although I have inserted tags for external images. To make sure your viewer is rendering the PDF correctly, here is a screenshot of page 1 (the 4th physical page) from Preview.
Here is a file of the text notes remaining to be edited and converted to PDF. Most of these were mined from the various websites I've built during the past year. Currently, about 56% of the total text has been edited and converted, resulting in 35 pages of PDF. If the same ratio is maintained for the rest of the text, then the total length of the report (not including images and tables) should be about 63 pages. With images and tables, that total would probably be closer to 100 pages.
The PDF file has been assembled by a custom program I wrote in Python. Although I have an old copy of Adobe In Design, I don't like it very much. In particular, I don't like being forced to use the mouse, menus, etc..., to drag and arrange everything on the page. Instead, I wanted to be able to create PDF using a text editor and set of command tags similar to how I create HTML pages (I don't use a special program for HTML either). Although this program is also a work in progress, currently I can create PDF text, graphics, and images using pure-text markup. For example, here is the source code that creates the PDF for page 1 shown above.
There are several issues still to be resolved about using images in the report. For example, here is a potential PDF layout for section 2.1, using 4 images that have been scaled to fill the page width. As you can see, this entails the creation of a lot of blank space at the bottom of each page. In order to effectively use the page space, the images must be made much smaller to fit. Here is an alternate layout for the first page of this section in which the first two images have been scaled to 25% of their actual size. I'm not sure how to resolve this issue, as it doesn't occur in HTML, since there are no page breaks to work around.
Another issue concerns rendering images on a printer vs. the screen. Most of the current images were created for viewing on screen from a website, and so look fairly good in PDF at resolutions of several hundred to a thousand or so pixels per side. However, depending on your printer and driver software, these may look completely awful when printed (try printing out the two PDF examples above). The largest of the 4 images used above is 1586x982. To achieve 300dpi output, this image would have to be reduced to 5.29" across the page. Even so, the 4-image example above is already 5.2 Mb in size. At this rate, a report containing 100 images would be 130 Mb in size. Most of my images are PNGs, which are usually much larger than JPEGs. I could try converting them to JPEGs of lower quality, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of making them look nice, and JPEG is a notoriously bad format for representing line art.
I apologize for not being farther along on the report by now. I admit that there has been much more work to do on this than I originally anticipated. But, whereas things may have gone a bit more slowly than I would have liked last month, I think that they are up to speed now, and I should be able to make much more rapid progress. I put in 200 hrs on the work in December, and I expect to put in about 300 hrs this month, so I am dedicated to getting it done. Hopefully this will be enough to finish both the final report and the GRL paper. I expect that since the I am making the report so long and detailed, the GRL paper will practically write itself (maybe?). But, we'll have to see.
Please get back to me ASAP with any comments, changes, or suggestions you might have. Feel free to edit any of the existing text, or contribute your own. I'll post new versions of the PDF every few days, so you can see the progress.
