Subject: tc-list Re: The GNT

From: Wieland Willker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 18:04:54 +0100

I don't know how the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft GNT will come out.
They already have the Luther-Bibel out at
http://www.dbg.de/bibel/luther.html

Mail them about your ideas and conceptions.

Their argument is that NA26 is an artificial text and not the Urtext,
therefore they have a copyright on it.

> If not, wouldn't it be easier to scan in entire pages of NA27?

Btw., does anybody know, how to scan (and OCR) Greek?
Is it possible for example to train Corel-Scan with Greek letters?

Best wishes
    Wieland

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 08:25:17 -0600

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Wieland Willker <[email-masked]> wrote,

>Is it possible for example to train Corel-Scan with Greek letters?

I'll just answer the technical part. :-)

Any trainable OCR program could be trained to read Greek. There are,
however, some complications. To begin with, there are accents and
breathings. These are small symbols, not connected to the letter they
are associated with. It may be possible to scan these, but you can
expect a very high rate of errors simply because the symbols are
small and not that topologically distinct.

Another complication is that the best OCR programs tend to have
dictionaries for the language they are scanning -- used to correct
odd words. So if an OCR program is confronted with "uniq*e," for instance
(where * represents a letter it can't read), it will correct it to
"unique." Unless one has a Greek dictionary, this feature needs to be
turned off, with resulting loss of accuracy.

With all that said, it should be clear that it would be best to
try to find an OCR program that has been customized for Greek.
I guess you will have to contact the manufacturers.

And in light of the above points, I guess I will toss in one aside on an
earlier point in this thread. It was suggested:

> My thoughts: At least one version should have
> 1. no accents
> 2. no different end-Sigma
> 3. the transliteration scheme X=Xi, C=Chi, Q=Theta and Y=Psi should be used
> 4. one should always have one complete book on the screen and not only one
     chapter.

YES to all these!

I realize that we won't be using OCR on this text, but it would certainly
make scanning easier....
Bob Waltz
[email-masked]

"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."