From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 1997 18:57:31 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Comments on PGP5.0 OCR (was Re: fyi, pgp source now available , internationally)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970811105552.3203A-100000@cowboy.dev.madge.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Charlie Root (root@cypherpunks.campsite.hip.nl) wrote:
>http://cypherpunks.campsite.hip97.nl/pgp/
>and
>http://www.pgpi.com/

(The former no longer seems to work, presumably because the machine is
packed up and on its way home.)

I just wanted to make a few comments on the proofreading, in case anyone
feels like releasing software in a similar manner in future:

The original printed and OCR-ed source gave a single checksum for each
page, with four bits per line. It also ignored whitespace except in
strings and comments. This meant that people could rapidly process the
majority of the code to produce something which wasn't terribly pretty but
functioned correctly. However, because there were only four bits per line
an incorrect line could pass the checksum; this would still be detected
because the checksums were chained, but it could mean that when an error
was detected you had to check several lines to find the invalid one. 

Presumably because of this the OCR-ed pages at HIP included a per-line
checksum. This was good... but... it also checksummed the whitespace. 
This wasn't a problem in theory, because tabs were indicated by a special
character. However, most lines had both tabs *and* spaces and there was no
way to see where the spaces were because they were overrriden by the tab
(e.g. "mov<sp><tab>ax,23<sp><sp><tab><sp><tab>; Stuff"). As a consequence
the proofreading went very slowly until some valiant folks (who may or may
not wish to be identified, so I won't) worked overnight to put together a
program to brute-force the checksum by trying all possible combinations of
tabs and spaces until it found the right one. 

So for a future effort could we please have the per-line checksums but
ignore the whitespace unless it's important (e.g. comments and strings
again)? Or if you want to ensure that the whitespace is identical between
versions, please either strip out unneccesary spaces or use a special
character for them so we can see precisely where they are. If all we want
is functioning code, then it doesn't have to look pretty; we can feed it
through a code prettifier like indent when it's functionally correct. 

	Mark