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I had discussed the "Official" online version of Bowditch with NIMA last year 
and IIRC part of that was reflected here at the time.

NIMA has a limited concern for non-military users and perhaps this project got 
dumped on someone who may have had the best of intent, but limited publishing 
experience and/or resources.

The official NIMA version is not available as one "book", it was available 
only as separate chapters, and it goes downhill from there.

Their ZIP file can be opened and extracted with PKZIP, WINZIP, or any of a 
half dozen other standard tools. WindowsXP can also natively open it.

NIMA now has apparently made a single ZIP file of the chapters available (they 
said that was not feasible last year) and that still leaves the user with 
something like 50 separate PDF files. That can be convenient, as opposed to 
the 40+mb master file size. As an online reference, NIMA's 2002 files are a 
bit of a dogs' dinner. The page numbers on the paper pages match the page 
numbers in the index and glossary, etc., but they do not match up with the 
actual page numbers in the PDF files, apparently because NIMA revised 
Bowditch without revising the page numbering and indexing. They combined 
chapters 28 and 29, leaving the new chapters to mismatch their titles. i.e., 
the new file for "Chapter 30" opens to show "Chapter 29, Hydrography" which 
indeed was Chapter 30 in the 1995 edition. And then, every successive chapter 
is off by one as well.

Even after all that, the user still has to jump among all those separate files.

So I've assmebled ALL THE CHAPTERS into one PDF file, and then properly 
renumbered the PDF page sequence, so that the forematter appears as pages "i" 
through "xi", followed by pages 1-8xx, and that looking for "Page 717" in the 
full PDF file will actually go to the page which is indexed and titled as 
"717". There were some other pagination errors I caught along the way.

When I corresponded with NIMA last year they had some thought about preventing 
copying by inserting their logo in the document, which, as I understand it, 
really accomplishes nothing with regard to US users. I've removed their logo 
from "my" edition of Bowditch, as per their wishes. Right now the "book" is 
reassembled properly, but the Acrobat bookmarks and links need to be rebuilt. 
I probably will have a CD version available by Monday, for personal use by US 
citizens only. (Our version of a "Crown Copyright" restriction.) Rebuilding a 
corrected set of bookmarks and links will take some time.

   

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