ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Greek

Bible Study software, Unicode, Fonts, Keyboards, creating Web pages in Greek, and other software issues.
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griroz
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Joined: December 31st, 2015, 5:58 pm

ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Greek

Post by griroz »

Hi.
ABBY FineReader can be taught to recognise any alphabet. Normally it can recognise only modern Greek characters, but it can be taught to recognise any Unicode characters.
I tried it once but my approach must have not been the best to teach it polytonic Greek.

Has anyone already done it?
If so, would anyone be able to share the file of already learned Ancient Greek "language" or share the file(s) (images) he/she taught FineReader with it? I don't know how many letters should I give to it and how many different files, to make it "learn".

If anyone, thanks
Jonathan Robie
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Re: ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Gr

Post by Jonathan Robie »

The best OCR results I've seen for older volumes of polytonic Greek come from Bruce Robertson's Lace project (http://heml.mta.ca/lace/), which is open source. There are classifiers for different font types, so it helps to be able to identify the font.

For more recently printed works, Nick White's Ancient Greek OCR project (http://ancientgreekocr.org/) may give better results, according to rumor.

I don't know of similarly good training materials for ABBY FineReader, but I don't have that program. Bruce and Nick are probably the world's leading experts on ancient Greek OCR, they may be able to tell you more.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
griroz
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Joined: December 31st, 2015, 5:58 pm

Re: ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Gr

Post by griroz »

Thank you very much for the contacts! :)
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4158
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
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Re: ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Gr

Post by Jonathan Robie »

griroz wrote:Thank you very much for the contacts! :)
You're welcome!

And one plea: if you are scanning in old texts, please consider (1) licensing them under a Creative Commons license and (2) making the text available on Github so people can easily get the source text and offer corrections.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Ken M. Penner
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Location: Antigonish, NS, Canada
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Re: ABBY FineReader (OCR program) - teaching it polytonic Gr

Post by Ken M. Penner »

griroz wrote:If so, would anyone be able to share the file of already learned Ancient Greek "language" or share the file(s) (images) he/she taught FineReader with it?
I have done some training for ABBYY FineReader 12 on the Athenaze textbook (second edition, I believe). The user pattern and language file can be accessed at https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=9 ... t=file.fbt
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
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