More about the transcripts than you probably want to know
For all of you inquiring minds, we thought we'd explain the transcript situation.
All of the transcripts come from the court reporter. They are sent to the volunteer law firm who is working on the case with us, Pepper Hamilton. For some reason, the people at Pepper can open all of the transcripts, but when they forward them on to us and to the National Center for Science Education, some of them are completely unreadable to us and some are sporadically garbled.(NCSE is also posting the transcripts on their website, and they are missing the same transcripts that we are.) When the trial is over, we will work with Pepper to obtain the missing transcripts, but until then, the legal team is focused on the trial itself (and we can't blame them, as much as we are dying to read Buckingham's transcript).
We have been posting the transcripts within a day of when they are forwarded to us. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no control over when they are sent to us. We are not selectively posting transcripts (which is certainly indicated by the fact that the transcripts from some of our best witnesses are the ones that have been damaged).
Later today we will post a revised transcript page that will list which days are actually missing, as opposed to those that were only half days of the trial.
Here is the missing Day 18 AM transcript.
All of the transcripts come from the court reporter. They are sent to the volunteer law firm who is working on the case with us, Pepper Hamilton. For some reason, the people at Pepper can open all of the transcripts, but when they forward them on to us and to the National Center for Science Education, some of them are completely unreadable to us and some are sporadically garbled.(NCSE is also posting the transcripts on their website, and they are missing the same transcripts that we are.) When the trial is over, we will work with Pepper to obtain the missing transcripts, but until then, the legal team is focused on the trial itself (and we can't blame them, as much as we are dying to read Buckingham's transcript).
We have been posting the transcripts within a day of when they are forwarded to us. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no control over when they are sent to us. We are not selectively posting transcripts (which is certainly indicated by the fact that the transcripts from some of our best witnesses are the ones that have been damaged).
Later today we will post a revised transcript page that will list which days are actually missing, as opposed to those that were only half days of the trial.
Here is the missing Day 18 AM transcript.
posted by ACLU of Pennsylvania at 11/02/2005 10:32:00 AM
8 Comments:
Sorry if I appear a bit confused, but do I understand correctly that the watered-down version of evolution being taught in Pennsylvania (micro-evolution) does not include information about change from one species to another, but the schoolboard wanted it understood by students that the part of evolution that they were not being told about (macro-evolution) had "gaps" in it??
And now for the companion to this post, “More about the PDF's than you probably want to know”.
I've wondered why some PDF's are around 300K while others are over 3MB, even though they all contain roughly 140-150 pages each. A little super-spy investigation revealed the following classified information (I looked at the documents properties in Acrobat):
Looking at Day 8
The AM transcript is about 3.02MB, 149 pages. The PM transcript runs 144 pages but only about 311K. Both documents list their producer as GNU Ghostscript 7.05. Always amusing to see open source software producing proprietary documents. The driver is listed as such:
AM: PSCRIPT.DRV Version 4.0
PM: PScript5.dll Version 5.2
Google indicates that these are Windows Postscript drivers, probably not the cause. However, if you look at the embedded fonts page as I did, you'll find 3 fonts in the 311K AM transcript, and a whopping 45 in the 3.02MB AM transcript. Looks like we found out why some are much larger than they should be. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find this has something to do with why you can't extract text from those documents as well.
I suspect paul tenny is right. I can't open the bad PDF on a Win2K system, but I can on a SuSE 9.2 system and the PDF reader complains about bad fonts right off.
Why can't these transcripts be converted to ordinary, everyday, compact, plain ASCII text that everybody can easily read?
I downloaded ghostscript version 7.05 and ghostview version 4.7 to try it out. Attempting to open one of the damaged files (Day16AMSession.pdf) gave the following error:
GSview 4.7 2005-03-26
GNU Ghostscript 7.05 (2002-04-22)
Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Scanning PDF file
**** This file has a corrupted %%EOF marker, or garbage after the %%EOF.
Error: /syntaxerror in readxref
Operand stack:
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1056/1123(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:77/200(L)-- --dict:97/127(ro)(G)-- --dict:229/230(ro)(G)-- --dict:14/15(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
I have zero experience in writing/editing/debugging document format code, much less this specific format, but maybe this will give someone a start.
Notice something about the 3MB transcripts, they are the ones which one cannot copy and paste or search with. They are also done by a particular court reporter.
This reporter is also responsible for the transcripts that are partially unreadable due to use of an improper font.
I know it was stated that the missing and partially unreadable files will be provided after the trial. I hope that new copies of the 3 MB files will also be provided.
I have been trying to put up HTML copies of the transcript up at T.O. If there is anyone who knows how to fix these files, or can do OCR work to get the text, please feel free to contact me.
According to Thomas Finney on The Panda's Thumb, the problem is with the PSCRIPT.DRV driver - this is apparently the original MicroSoft driver from Windows 95, which didn't work that well 10 years ago. :)
Would it be possible for someone to communicate this to Wes, as it's only his transcripts that have the problem? The entire civilized world is waiting to read Mr Buckingham's testimony. :)
A bunch of computer incompetents...
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