Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience

Summary: Get the book here.

This is a cleaned version of the book "Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience" by James E. Tomayko, available as PDF from https://www.ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880069935.pdf and as HTML from https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html.

The original PDF version is several hundreds of megabytes large, making it hard to print and to navigate. On the other hand, the original HTML version is not available on a single page, making it also hard to print.

This project has created a representation of the book that can be used to yield both HTML and PDF versions. These versions are smaller (in file size) than their originals, easy to navigate (containing a hyperlinked index), can be easily printed, and fix several mistakes. In addition, the PDF reproduces the page numbers (until the "source notes" on page 303) and layout of the original book, so references to pages of the original book remain valid.

The format of choice to represent the book is Markdown. I use the flavour of the Pandoc document converter, which allows conversion of Markdown to several formats such as HTML, PDF, ePub and so on.

To generate a PDF/HTML, you need Pandoc with pandocfilters. I use the version 1.19.2.4, which is shipped with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It can be installed via sudo apt install pandoc python-pandocfilters. For PDF generation, you need a TeX distribution, such as TeX Live.

Generation of PDF is just a make away. For HTML, run make book.html.

Remaking Of

My motivation and the "remaking of" this book is further detailed in a blog post of mine.

TODO

This is work in progress. Help with the following points is welcome. Just compare the output of the original PDF with the generated PDF. KOMA-Script experience is particularly helpful.

• Show code figure captions in HTML (e.g. in Appendix II).
• Make page breaks absolute.
• Increase line spacing for headlines (but not always, see p. 258 in Ch8-3).
• Increase paragraph spacing for boxes.
• Do not break paragraphs after boxes that are in-between text (for example Box 4-6 in Ch4-7)
• Indent first paragraph of a section/subsection.
• Fix figure placement (see for example p. 196 in Ch6-3).
• Center box headlines and make them bold.