During lunch today I had a conversation with a coworker, who brought up Tom Coburn’s Wastebook 2014. I’d heard about it in previous years, but never actually read the contents of it directly before. This time I figured I’d actually read up on it so I could respond to her stances more coherently.
I haven’t read it through yet. I admit, I found myself distracted. While I appreciate the citations, I found myself infuriated that such a well-cited document would make it so difficult to actually reference the citations, especially considering they’re mostly URLs. There’s no links from the citations themselves to the bibliography, and the bibliography itself doesn’t contain links, so the text must be manually copied and pasted into a browser. Why is this so needlessly difficult?
I figured there was no need for that. I figured this was an excuse to practice my vim / sed / regex skills, and clean it up a little. I figured I’d share what I’ve produced: An HTML version of the document that includes citations as actual, clickable hyperlinks.
Extracting text from a PDF isn’t really as nice a process as I’d like, so there’s a lot to clean up, but maybe this will at least be a handy tool alongside the original PDF version.
Link here. I might clean it up a bit more when I have a chance. Feel free to do so yourself - I apologize if the copyright is questionable here, I’m just trying to make things more readable.