http://www.teleread.com/library/u-of-michigan-digitizing-islamic-manuscripts/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:26:53 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.teleread.com/library/u-of-michigan-digitizing-islamic-manuscripts/comment-page-1/#comment-1121422 Luqman Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:29:53 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/?p=26491#comment-1121422 It's interesting that they can't OCR them. Handwritten Arabic, unless it is unduly caligraphic, doesn't differ too much from "printed" Arabic, except for some orthographic changes it has undergone through the centuries in different regions (i.e. in the Moroccan "Maghrebi" script, the dots of some letters are place below the line and not above it). This should be less of an issue with more recent texts, even if they are handwritten. Then again, if they are annotated like some of the traditional religious texts that I possess, then the spiraling maze of commentaries and footnotes would be very difficult to compute. It’s interesting that they can’t OCR them. Handwritten Arabic, unless it is unduly caligraphic, doesn’t differ too much from “printed” Arabic, except for some orthographic changes it has undergone through the centuries in different regions (i.e. in the Moroccan “Maghrebi” script, the dots of some letters are place below the line and not above it). This should be less of an issue with more recent texts, even if they are handwritten. Then again, if they are annotated like some of the traditional religious texts that I possess, then the spiraling maze of commentaries and footnotes would be very difficult to compute.

]]>