Preparing old book for EPUB

CazMar · 07-07-2011, 08:23 PM

Having seen the wonderful work some of our MR gang do preparing old books for us to download I thought I would spend some time tidying up a Google scan of Windelband's History of Ancient Philosophy. This was all working OK until I came to the first piece of Ancient Greek. I had to write it out in Unicode (which works) but by the time I had reached about the 15th piece of Greek I was becoming totally sick of the whole thing! The OCR that Google uses turns Greek into a string of gibberish. Has anyone out there tried to scan and convert a non-Roman alphabet with any success? Any tricks and tips to pass on? I am just trying to avoid having to retype every piece of Greek.

charleski · 07-07-2011, 08:53 PM

Well, it looks like you're going to have to OCR the Greek parts yourself. Most decent OCR packages shouldn't have a problem beyond the fact that they're setup for modern Greek, and so will miss a lot of the diacritical marks. This is what happens in ABBYY Finereader - it recognises the basic Greek letterforms without any problems, but fails to capture the diacritics.

pholy · 07-07-2011, 10:53 PM

There's also a special Greek font with all those diacritics at the American Philological Association. They have some programs for Windows and Macs to make it easier to type. too.

I haven't used any of that - I ran across it just a few days ago.

CazMar · 07-07-2011, 10:53 PM

I must admit I hadn't thought of rescanning the book - that is a very good idea and might be a lot tidier than Google's efforts. I don't mind if it misses a few diacritical marks, but at least gives the sense of the quotation.

07-07-2011, 08:23 PM	#1
CazMar Book Geek Posts: 596 Karma: 1499085 Join Date: Aug 2010 Location: Adelaide, Australia Device: Kobo Touch, Asus MemPad 7" tablet, Nexus 5, Asus 10" tablet	Preparing old book for EPUB Having seen the wonderful work some of our MR gang do preparing old books for us to download I thought I would spend some time tidying up a Google scan of Windelband's History of Ancient Philosophy. This was all working OK until I came to the first piece of Ancient Greek. I had to write it out in Unicode (which works) but by the time I had reached about the 15th piece of Greek I was becoming totally sick of the whole thing! The OCR that Google uses turns Greek into a string of gibberish. Has anyone out there tried to scan and convert a non-Roman alphabet with any success? Any tricks and tips to pass on? I am just trying to avoid having to retype every piece of Greek.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Preparing to Root question	roger_15	Nook Developer's Corner	11	01-10-2011 04:43 PM
Preparing to enter The Airport	Taylor514ce	Lounge	64	01-17-2009 10:43 AM
On preparing photos for e-ink screens	RickyMaveety	Workshop	16	06-23-2008 05:47 PM
Is Borders preparing for a Sony Reader book club?	Bob Russell	Deals and Resources (No Self-Promotion or Affiliate Links)	3	10-03-2006 11:17 AM

07-07-2011, 08:53 PM	#2
charleski Wizard Posts: 1,196 Karma: 1281258 Join Date: Sep 2009 Device: PRS-505	Well, it looks like you're going to have to OCR the Greek parts yourself. Most decent OCR packages shouldn't have a problem beyond the fact that they're setup for modern Greek, and so will miss a lot of the diacritical marks. This is what happens in ABBYY Finereader - it recognises the basic Greek letterforms without any problems, but fails to capture the diacritics.

07-07-2011, 10:53 PM	#3
pholy Booklegger Posts: 1,801 Karma: 7999816 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Device: BeBook(1 & 2010), PEZ, PRS-505, Kobo BT, PRS-T1, Playbook, Kobo Touch	There's also a special Greek font with all those diacritics at the American Philological Association. They have some programs for Windows and Macs to make it easier to type. too. I haven't used any of that - I ran across it just a few days ago.

Advert