Changelog — Reports that Matter

2026-08-02 — A third report, and better footnotes everywhere

¶Added: Investigation of the Challenger Accident — the House Science Committee's 1986 report into the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. 438 pages, 99.8% of the source text retained.

¶Footnotes. Nearly all of them are now found and placed beside the text: recall went from about three-quarters to around 97%. Where a footnote block had previously been missed, its citations were left stranded in the middle of the prose; that no longer happens.

¶Page numbers now work for reports that print them at the top of the page as well as the bottom. The Wall Street report puts them in a header and so had no page anchors at all — it now has 628.

¶Contents pages are cleaner. Numbered recommendations were being read as section headings, filling a contents list with half-sentences.

2026-08-02 — Reports split into sections

¶A report is no longer one enormous page. The Wall Street report was 2.9 MB — not a reading experience, a download. Each report now opens on its contents, and each section is a page of its own, following the document's own structure. The whole report is still available on one page for anyone who wants to search across it.

¶Links made before the split still work. A link naming a passage is routed to the section holding it, and anything else falls back to the whole-report view.

2026-08-02 — The archive is back

¶The previous version of this site is readable again at old.reportsthatmatter.org. Its old URLs redirect there.

2026-08-02 — The Wall Street report, properly converted

¶The PSI financial crisis report had been converted before the ingestion pipeline existed, and it showed. 8,178 blocks with a median length of 89 characters — prose paragraphs run to about 600 — because every line of the PDF had become its own paragraph. 1,641 stray page numbers left mid-text. Two headings in a 645-page document.

¶Re-ingested from the source PDF: 162 headings, 98.3% of the source text retained, no stranded page numbers, and paragraphs that are actually paragraphs.

¶Doing it exposed a real gap. Footnote numbers appear in two layouts — inline with their text, or alone on a line with the text beneath — and only the first was supported. This report had yielded 7 footnotes; it now yields 1,356, rendered as 2,725 sidenotes. The Jack Smith report gained from the same fix, 206 → 229.

¶The report moved to /reports/us-psi-financial-crisis, matching its source repository. The old URL redirects.

2026-08-02 — Sidenotes, and links that stay put

¶Sidenotes. Footnotes now sit in the margin beside the sentence they support rather than 70 KB away at the end of the document. A footnote you have to travel to is a footnote nobody reads, and in these reports the citation is the evidence. On narrow screens, where there is no margin, a note opens on tap.

¶Stable paragraph links. Paragraph addresses now derive from the paragraph's own opening words — #rioters-capitol rather than #p-318. The old scheme numbered by position, which meant that re-converting a report to fix a single scanning error renumbered everything after it: every link ever shared kept working while quietly pointing at different text. For a project whose whole proposition is citing the exact passage, that was the worst available failure.

¶Printed page anchors. The page numbers from the original document are now addressable — #page-46 — and shown in the margin. It is how these documents are actually cited, and it can be checked against the original PDF.

¶Shared links preview the passage. A link to a specific paragraph now shows that paragraph in the preview when posted, instead of a generic site description.

2026-08-01 — The site, rebuilt

¶A new design: off-white, mid-grey rather than black, a classical serif for the documents themselves and small monospaced type for everything structural. Fewer things, more space. Serious documents should look serious.

¶Behind it, a new ingestion pipeline — PDF in, clean Markdown out, deterministically — with automated fidelity checks that gate on what can actually be decided: that no text was invented, that none was lost, that no page furniture survived. Whether a scan was read correctly is a human judgement, so the pipeline surfaces the passages most likely to be wrong for review rather than hiding them behind a score.

¶First report through it: the Jack Smith Special Counsel report, Volume One — 169 pages, 99% of the source retained, every paragraph individually linkable.

¶Highlight any passage to copy a link straight to it.