Order your copy of Public Domain Computer Programs for the Aeronautical Engineer. Ralph Carmichael ralph@pdas.com
Public Domain Aeronautical Software
P.O. Box 1438 Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA
Explanation of technique used to build the tables of profiles, mean lines, and airfoils from Abbott and von Doenhoff.
The tables from the appendices are quite extensive and I have been asked how they were made. You know, did I use Dreamweaver or Cold Fusion or Front Page or some other HTML editor? With this much data, it is unreasonable to expect anyone to build up the tables shown by cutting and pasting, so one must use some sort of software aid with scripting in order to get the data copied accurately into the HTML file.
My answer is quite simple. The software tool that I used to make the pages was the Fortran compiler. To do this, you must be familiar with simple HTML commands and then simply use the subroutines in the NacaAuxiliary module supplied with the naca456 program. The data is presented as tables using the <table> construct of HTML. You will need to know the <tr>, <th>, <td> tags as well as colspan and align and some other HTML keywords. If you want to study the Fortran program that created the HTML files with the profiles, mean lines, and airfoils, you may download a copy (avd.zip, 35 KB). If you are interested in creating content for the web, you may find the techniques useful. As always with the code from PDAS, everything is totally public domain open source, so you may use whatever you need for your projects.