At 11:28 AM 8/1/02 -0700, you wrote:

Good lord Terry. Coast Pilot 7 for the Pacific Coast is 129 Megabytes.
My friends with high speed DSL are going to get work out.

Capt. Mike Maurice
Near Portland Oregon.

http://chartmaker.ncd.noaa.gov/nsd/coastpilot.htm

This sounds like a great idea, but their implementation is virtually
useless. Their approach was (for Coast Pilot 7) to hack the book into 20
separate PDF files. What this means is, you:

1. First look something up in the "Index" file
2. Load the "Front" file to determine which section it's in (you have to
   guess, because there's no cross-reference between page #s and sections).
3. Load the section file and scroll to the right page (they didn't
   implement paging within the file, and if they did the page #s would be
   off anyway).

For the things I was interested in, this section file itself is 41MB and
takes perhaps a half-minute to load.

Full text searching of the Coast Pilot? Fuggedaboutit. Remember, it's 20
separate files.

Keith

Not that I'm usually willing to come to the defense of bureaucracy, but
they seemed to me to do a reasonable thing here. You can just download
the relevant parts, and skip the rest. If you want to be able to do
lookups, a purchase of Adobe Acrobat, about $125 (street price), will
allow you to concatenate the files together pretty easily.

Not a perfect solution, but I think that it falls in the "LOA" category
(Least Objectionable Alternative). The enterprising mariner could
assemble various Pilots, guidebooks, personal notes, etc. and rip them
into Acrobat (.pdf) format. This would be a great reference, fully
searchable.

Doug Barnard
currently in custom Skipjack 20 stern drive
soon-to-be beginning construction
Origami Steel Swain 40 "Lotus Dream"
near Ventura, CA
http://www.virtualacreage.com/LotusDream

HiHo,

Like Doug, I don't want to be an apologist for any bureaucracy but the site
did mention repeatedly that this implementation is a test and not
necessarily the final format for the on line Coast Pilot. Further, they
seemed to be almost begging for input from their target audiences.

Defensively yours,

Alex

necessarily the final format for the on line Coast Pilot. Further, they
seemed to be almost begging for input from their target audiences.

Wow, I can't believe so many people missed my point. I figured that - by
pointing out the flaws with their implementation - I'd save a bunch of
listees the trouble of DLing all those files. But you're all sitting on
T1s and bandwith, diskspace, and spare time are free. Note that all the
people "defending" the government haven't actually tried to use the
online versions. The only post I've seen (or received, I've gotten some
e-mail on this too) from someone who actually tried the online version
noted that "The printed version is definitely easier to use."

Anyway, I sent a bunch of comments and suggestions to the author. I'll
post a response if I get one...

Keith