This repository contains a computer-readable version (in LaTeX format) of one of the many reports on the U.S. Department of Defense’s struggle with software acquisition.
The report here, the 1987 Defense Science Board report (led by Fred Brooks, famous for Brooks’s Law), is available today from the DoD's DTIC website as a scanned PDF. Although the text is already OCR’d (which made it possible to convert), it was scanned from a poor quality original and as a result is both hard to read at times and very large to download.
So I took it upon myself to make a version that I could post on a Github.
Right now there is the LaTeX source and the generated PDF itself. I’ve also
used pandoc to create a Markdown version,
though it is not quite to the quality of the PDF version at this point.
The generated PDF should be available directly from the repository but if you make changes to the LaTeX source you’ll probably want to be able to rebuild yourself.
If you want to generate a PDF version yourself after making changes, here’s all I did:
xelatex dsb-report.tex
xelatex dsb-report.tex
The result is saved as dsb-report.pdf if everything goes well.
You have to run LaTeX twice to adapt to the possibility of new citations, new sections renumbering LaTeX counters, etc.
As you can tell from the command line, I used the XeTeX/XeLaTeX variant, which permits direct use of Unicode (such as the “fancy quotes” for proper typography) and easier support for modern fonts. In this case I used Crimson Text from Google Fonts, and those fonts need to be present in the same directory for this to work with XeLaTeX.
- Michael Pyne, Feb. 2020