A/FD is online

Jose wrote:
I'd like to see the entire book online as text and image (not bloated
PDF) so I can put it in my palm and take it with me everywhere.

I tried running pdftotext and pdfimages on the file for the local airport.
pdftotext -layout produces a fairly recognizeable text file; the main
oddity is that some of the text comes out with extra spaces in it, such
as "RADIO AIDS TO NAVIGATION: N O T A M F I L E T U L ." pdfimages
produces nothing, which probably means that the airport diagrams are in
some kind of vector format instead of a raster format. pdftoppm renders
the whole page into a raster image; if the diagrams are in a predictable
place on the page, the process of cropping the diagram out of the page
and saving it by itself could be automated. All of these programs are
part of xpdf ( http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ ); xpdf is a PDF viewer and
set of utilities for Xwindows but the utilities are also available for
legacy systems.

FWIW, I had no problems using the site with Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Linux, at
least to look up a few different airports in the state. It does want to
set one "ASPSESSIONID..." cookie at the beginning, but doesn't appear to
set any others. If the search doesn't work, the URLs of the PDFs appear
to be of the form

http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/RR_N_DDMMMYYYY.pdf

where RR is an FAA region, such as "sc" for south central, "sw" for
southwest, etc. N is something like a page number; it seems to start at
1 and go up from there. The actual page number as displayed on screen
seems to be 19 + N. N is not zero-padded; the first file is _1_, the
tenth file is _10_, the hundredth file is _100_, etc. DDMMMYYYY is the
beginning of the update cycle, such as "23SEP2006". The URLs for the
Legend and Supplemental pages appear to be of the form

http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/RR_front_DDMMMYYYY.pdf (Legend)
http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/RR_back_DDMMMYYYY.pdf (Supplemental)

where RR and DDMMMYYYY are as above. However, at least in the case of
"sc", these two files are dated 28SEP but the main content files are
dated 23SEP. If you look at the first displayed page number in the
Supplemental PDF and subtract 20, you should theoretically get the last
valid N for the main content. At least for "sc", that didn't quite work;
the Supplemental starts on page 359, which would imply that the last main
content page would be http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/sc_339_23SEP2006.pdf ,
but the last main content page is really
http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/sc_337_23SEP2006.pdf . This has to be done
by experiment, because you can't get at http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/
directly.

You will know if you've asked for an invalid file name in an interactive
Web browser, because the server goes into an amusing loop. In the
interest of science, I let it rip and it got to
http://www.naco.faa.gov/pdfs/iis/mis...sc/default.asp
before I stopped it.

The above information can be combined with your favorite scripting
language and http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/pdf-append.php (I used
the Ghostscript way) to make what some may actually want, which is one
PDF with multiple pages in it.

Matt Roberds