I’ve decided to have a go at OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia myself, now I have established that the OCR quality is not really that bad. I’ve taken the first 195 pages and divided that up into 4 Abbyy Finereader projects, of 50 pages each (well, 3 lots of 50 and one lot of 45). I’ve also customised the English language recognition by creating a new language “English and Arabic” and adding a bunch of vowels with overscores etc to it. It works reasonably well, I find.
This should be a relaxing thing to work on in the coming weeks, as it gets colder. There is no actual rush to get it done, after all. I’ve cancelled the job I placed at PeoplePerHour.com — there were some good and interesting quotes, but I will enjoy doing it myself.
But I can’t do much with it at the moment — too full of cold and too muzzy-headed today.