[bobcdy]

I recently posted a question in the workshop and receive no answers. I thought I would try here and see if there are any opinions:

I'd like to make an ebook involving a very old English scientific work that was published in Old English (or sometimes called Fraktur) with many ligature such as an odd glyph for c and t made by connecting the c with a curly line to the top of the t, there were others oddities such as the s looks almost like an f. The result is that a OCR of the scan creates numerous highly variable errors because as in the case of the ct ligature, the ocr doesn't know what it is and may think it's a 'c' or a 'd' or a 't' or something such as $. This makes it impossible to perform a search and replace to quickly correct a large number of ocr mistakes, and manually correcting these errors is extraordinarily time-consuming.

Recently the fractur book was reissued in a modern font with an detailed new analysis and discussion of the work.

I'd like to use the modern reissue for making the ebook (only from the original early text and nothing unique to the current book) but I don't know if the change to modern type consitutes a reason for a new copyright. I don't think it should, because, for example, simply changing the font from the original type to Book Antiqua on a public domain book doesn't trigger copyright protection. Changing a frakture font to a modern one isn't like a true translation of changing one language to another because there is no originality involved - there are ocr programs (very expensive) that will automatically change the fraktur font to its modern equivalent.

What is your opinion - does the change in font create a new copyright?