In my post about PoDIS now being free, I asked for a volunteer to reformat the two PDFs into a nicer single file. Iliyan Georgiev, a PhD student at the University of Saarland, stepped up and took over. After a few iterations, with Andrew and me providing feedback, he’s made an excellent new version of “Principles of Digital Image Synthesis”. Download this new version from here (right-click and “Save link as…”).

This new version is much superior to the one on Google Books. It’s a single, searchable file (the Google Books version is just a scan without any OCR), it has a hyperlinked table of contents (actually, two of them), and has all errata folded into the text.

Along the way I learned a new trick from Iliyan: you can put PDFs (or any file type at all) into your Google Docs area and make them entirely public, which is how this version of the book is distributed. This is good news for all researchers: you can now host your publications in your own account. No hassling with the I.T. guys to get an account, no fuss if you move to another institution. Now no researcher needs to be held back by “it’s not company policy to give public web space” or other bureaucracy. Having a web site is nicer, but hosting in this way is free and simple. You can host up to a gigabyte for free.