Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I have just, this evening, finished adding manually italics to 40 pages of a scanned text in Finereader 11. I export this to Word, and it doesn’t seem to contain my changes. And … while I was fiddling with formatting on the very last page, and trying to export my work, it has silently erased [...]
This afternoon I sat down with Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel 8-10 (and Jerome’s preface), and compared our translation with the 2010 ACW one. The object of the exercise was to locate any serious differences in understanding, and allow us to revise the translation if the ACW version suggested an improvement. I am pleased to say [...]
I’ve scanned and uploaded two books by Michael Bourdeaux here. The Faith on Trial in Russia volume in particular is important reading for the persecution of the Russian baptists in the USSR. I’ve been working on Gorbachev, Glasnost & The Gospel, one of the late Keston volumes. I scanned the pages using Finereader 8 — [...]
Last night I completed the arduous task of manually correcting all the OCR’d pages of Ibn Abi Usaibia. Not that it is perfect even now — optically correcting is an error-prone business. Today I moved on to the next step — getting the text out of Abbyy Finereader 10, and into some format that can [...]
This morning I got hold of Nuance Omnipage 18 standard edition. The box was very light: mostly air, a CDROM, and a cheeky bit of cheaply printed paper announcing that they included no manuals at all, in order to save the planet. Humph. The footprint is quite small, and I copied the CDROM to my hard [...]
Finereader 11 looks quite a lot like Finereader 10. So far, it seems very similar. Once nice touch is that when it is reading a page, a vertical bar travels down the thumbnail. But I have already found an oddity. I imported into it the project that I am currently working on in Finereader 10 — [...]
Scanning and OCR is on my mind at the moment. A new version of Abbyy Finereader — version 11 — is out. Since I have some 750 pages of Ibn Abi Usaibia to do, any improvement in accuracy is welcome, however slight. Originally I did my OCR using Omnipage. It is many years since I was [...]
For many years I have used Abbyy Finereader as my OCR software. Version 10 is now out, and I have just bought an upgrade. Mind you, I have retained copies of FR8 and FR9 on my disk, installed and ready to use. FR9 was quite an improvement in OCR terms on FR8, and has better [...]
It’s hot and humid here; so much so, that I can’t think straight. So I’ve been looking at the piles of photocopied articles and running them through my scanner and throwing away the photocopy. That’s a mindless activity I can do. Not sure I’m quite there yet, tho. The PDF’s are OK, but they aren’t [...]
I’ve now scanned in images of all the pages (around 600) of this monstrously heavy volume — my forearms will never be the same — using Abbyy Finereader 8 to control the scanner. I scanned in black-and-white at 400 dpi, which is the best for OCR. I’ve gone through the batch, turning alternate pages the right [...]