This document has always been one of my favorite pieces of this story, but with the sensational appeal of the LAP, it's often taken a back seat in discussions of Isaac's posted material.
I thought it would be nice to see this document in a more polished format so I recreated it. onthefence was kind enough to post this on the DRT server, so here's the link.
http://droneteam.com/images/isaac/PACL_Q486_Research_Report_re-creation.pdfIt doesn't exactly match the scans, but it's pretty close.
While working on this, I noticed a few things that might spark some interesting discussion.
1) I know there was once a great deal of discussion about the typesetting and layout of these documents but I don't recall any conclusions. The fonts I used aren't exact matches but most letters are pretty close. The page headers user Arial Narrow, the cover and the section headers use Arial, and the body copy uses Times Roman. These are probably the most common fonts of all, and yet they match pretty well. In the Arial font the capital letter Q is different as are the numbers. Does anyone know if the actual fonts were ever identified?
2) The scans are all slightly distorted in a way that indicates the pages remained bound when they were scanned. Isaac didn't take them apart and scan them flat. They are each bent toward the center by varying amounts making exact measurements difficult. I identified the page margins as 1" top, 1" bottom, 1" center, .75" outside. As a result of the difficulty in measurements I had to stretch the characters and adjust the kerning to get it to fit in roughly the same positions. I may go back an re examine the scans to see if I can determine more precisely the margins, font size, leading, etc.
3) I'd be surprised if I were the first to notice this, but there's a typo on page 7 under 4.2.5 OVERVIEW of A2 AND A3, 2nd line. It says "(seen in in figure 4.3)".
4) The photos on the scanned pages, are cropped exactly the same as the sizes of the original color scans. What does this mean? I think we have to assume that the photos reproduced in the original document were black and white. If not that means Isaac made photocopies or otherwise converted them to B&W before scanning them. The scans are in color as evidenced by the light blue "T" that has been pointed out, ...a feature on the back of Isaac's scanner top that shows through the thin paper of the original under the bright scanner light. Besides color printing was no easy task in 1986 and would have been unnecessary for a document like this. I chose to use the color photos to make it look nicer as a trade off to authenticity. But how is it that the size of the color photos that Isaac posted exactly matches the crop of the same images in the document. Whoever prepared the original document would have used scans of these photos themselves. If Isaac has the actual original photos as he claims, how did he manage to scan them to the precise size used in the document, especially when the document page scans were very irregular? The only thing I can think of is that Isaac did not scan the color photos at all, but rather posted the exact same scans used in the layout of the original document. Could he have pilfered copies of these image scans on floppy disks? If so, he'd have had to convert them from some older image format into jpgs. But if he scanned them from original photo prints how could he maintain the exact same width to height ratio with the exact same crop area? Those images vary in size.
Lastly, I used OCR to convert the text from these scans. I had to correct many OCR mistakes, but I'm sure there are some I've overlooked. If anyone notices discrepancies and would like me to correct them, just let me know. One mildly interesting thing I noticed in the OCR data from page 5. The image area at the top of that page of course returned a bunch of gibberish, but among the gibberish was the word "gamma". Just a weird observation. Meaningless I'm sure.
Anyway, I just wanted to add my contribution here and hopefully generate some thought provoking discussion.
