Politics:
Progress: Believe it or not, I am making progress on my half of Tabula Rasa III. I think I have enough character archetypes, plenty of major factions, and a good fraction of the plots. Time to start boiling it down: combining archetypes to make fully-rounded characters, drawing lines on the web and seeing what plots fall out of it. It's still a long ways off, but it's beginning to look like a game.
Facsimiles: In conversation with
More Scanning: Related to that: it's wonderful to have the right toys for the job. Twice this month, I've tried to OCR books in using the software provided with my scanner, and neither has gone all that well. First, I was scanning in Spavento's "Brags" for
Anyway, I finally knuckled under and bought a copy of ABBYY Finereader Pro 5.0. This is an old and obsolete (but decently cheap) version of what seems to be the state of the art OCR software -- specifically, it's the program recommended by the Distributed Proofreaders project, and the version that they specifically say is good enough.
I'm pretty impressed. The recognition right out of the box is a good deal better than the HP stuff. It has recognition built in for a *zillion* languages (and spelling checking for many of them, although sadly not Latin). Best of all, it has a built-in training mode, so that you can teach it how to cope with fancy or obsolete orthography. It's still not perfect -- the combination of the faded text of Pembrokshire and the period spelling results in it usually seeing "e" as "c" (since the crossbars have mostly faded, and it can't use the dictionary to figure that out). But I've taught it to deal with the tall period "s", which is cool in and of itself, and I've got the accuracy of the period text up to around 95%: pretty impressive, given that it's basically flying without a dictionary. (The accuracy in the modern-English footnotes is far higher: almost perfect, despite the small and faded print.) And the "spelling check" mode is really quite a nice side-by-side editor for fixing the transcription errors.
I'm pleased enough that I might yet upgrade to a current version of the software -- while my copy of 5.0 is "new" and legal, I'm fairly sure that it's been sitting in a retailer storeroom for several years, and my shareware instincts encourage me to actually give some money to the creators of this excellent piece of software. Need to figure out how much more an upgrade would cost...