Month: November 2011

Methodius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now agreed terms to translate the Bonwetsch text of Methodius De Lepra.  The work survives in Old Slavonic, plus Greek fragments.  Bonwetsch did not print the Old Slavonic, but a German translation of it, interspersed with untranslated passages of the original Greek. 

I would have much preferred to translate the Old Slavonic, but I have no clear idea of how to obtain this, since it has never been published.

I’ve not used this translator before, so we will see what sort of job he does.  The price is quite a bit more than I really like; but I’ll do it as an experiment.  The result will go online as public domain, of course.  I shall add in whatever footnotes are useful from Bonwetsch — biblical references and the like.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent part of this afternoon working on proofing a fresh chunk of the translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, History of Physicians.  I’m beginning to find that I need to make global find and replaces in each chunk for the same sorts of things: Abu needs to become Abū, Air to become Alī, Ibrāhfm change to Ibrāhīm, and so on.  Unfortunately Finereader does not give me any macro facility; I have to hit Ctrl-H and go through as much of the list as I can remember.

What is needed, obviously, is a script.  Or else a macro facility, or some kind of automation.  It needs to operate by recording what I do, and then be editable.

Anyone got any suggestions?  I have tried AutoIt and AutoHotKey, and neither has the recorder facility.  AutoHotKey claims to have it, but it is not in fact installed.

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The date of the Mithraeum of San Clemente in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Someone online told me today that the Mithraeum underneath the church of San Clemente in Rome was first century.  Of course I knew that Mithraic archaeology starts ca. 100, so I wondered what date the Mithraeum really was.

The Mithraeum was discovered by an Irish father, Fr. Joseph Mullooly, whose publication Saint Clement (1873) is online[1] says that the Mithraeum was discovered in 1869, but because of ground water excavation only became possible in 1914, that it is “of the early third century” and gives references of E. Junyent, Il titolo di San Clemente in Roma (1932), p.66-81; Vermaseren Corpus 1.156-59; and Nash (?) 2.75-78.  It is  unfortunate that none of this material is accessible online.  It would be useful to know more.

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, there is mention in JSTOR in an American journal of a 1915 article by Franz Cumont:

In C. R. Acad. Insc. [?] 1915, pp.203-211 (3 figs) F. Cumont reports on “recent archaeological work in the cellar of the church of Saint Clement in Rome.  This church rests upon the foundations of a temple of Mithra built at some unknown date in  a large house of the time of Augustus.  After much trouble water was diverted from the site which is now dry and open to inspection.  Part of a heavy wall belonging to the republican period can now be seen. Recent discoveries include a fountain which stood before the temple; numerous remains of animals, especially of wild boars; and part of the altar discovered in 1859.  It is inscribed CN. ARRIVS. CLAVDIANUS | PATER POSUIT. and dates from the end of the second century A.D.  The head of a solar deity found in 1869 is of the same date.

Don’t you just hate abbreviations?  Thanks to Google and some guessing, it seems to be ” Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Inscriptions”.  Thankfully French journals are starting to come online, thanks to www.persee.fr, and the CRAI is here.  A  bit of poking around and the article proves to be Découvertes nouvelles au Mithréum de Saint-Clément à Rome.   But it doesn’t give us much.

The need for access to the Vermaseren’s CIMRM online remains acute.

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  1. [2]↩
  2. [1]Fr. Joseph Mullooly, Saint Clement, Pope and martyr, and his basilica in Rome, Rome, 1873.  http://www.archive.org/details/saintclement00mulluoft[/ref].  A recent topographical dictionary[2]Lawrence Richardson, A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome, p.257: preview here.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today has been dedicated to life’s little chores.  But there is a little news.

Last night I did some more OCR on Ibn Abi Usaibia.  We passed the page 320 mark.

I’m still negotiating to translate Methodius, De Lepra from the mixture of German and Greek that Bonwetsch printed in GCS 27.  The price is quite a bit higher than I wanted, but I’ll find the money for this one and treat it as an experiment.

I’ve also done a bit of work on the GCS page.  A correspondent has pointed out that there is a way to download the volumes from the Polish library as a single .djvu file, rather than a zip file of myriads of pages.  This works (not in IE8 tho — I got it working in Firefox 5), and I’m redownloading some of the files now.

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ALDL demanding copies they aren’t entitled to?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A letter arrives today, addressed to my company, Chieftain Publishing, from the “Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries”. 

In the UK there is a duty on publishers to supply a free copy of each of 6 libraries: The British Library, Oxford, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland, ditto of Wales, and Trinity College Dublin.  It is a much resented provision among publishers, especially publishers of expensive limited-run books.  It’s not that useful a provision, when you consider that none of these libraries will make copies available by inter-library loan to people like you and I. 

The letter demands 5 copies of the Eusebius book paperback, under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003. 

But they’ve already had 5 copies of the hardback, and indeed I have an acknowledgement of receipt.  So I’m rather baffled.  Can they really be entitled to yet more copies of a book which are basically the same?

But the web is a wonderful thing.  The Act itself is here, and laid out — thankfully — in a very readable form.  And what do I see at the top?

Duty to deposit
1.Deposit of publications
2.New and alternative editions
3.Enforcement

“New and alternative editions” sounds relevant, so I open it up.  And I find…

(1)This Act does not apply to a work which is substantially the same as one already published in the same medium in the United Kingdom.

So I have written back and queried their request.  After all, whatever would the libraries whom they represent do with TWO copies of the book?  I shall await a response with interest.

But I wonder how many publishers just sent copies regardless?  And what happens to them?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m continuing to scan the History of physicians by Ibn Abi Usaibia.  I’ve done another 40 pages lately, which takes us up to 288.  But we’re still only about a third of the way through.

I’ve had a possible bid at PeoplePerHour.com to translate Methodius De lepra; the first bid was too high, but we’re much closer now.  It’s still more than I ever wanted to pay, but I’m willing to give it a go, so long as the quality is there.

The sales figures for November for Amazon for Eusebius: Gospel Problems and Solutions have arrived.  14 copies were sold through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.  My company also sold a few copies directly.  It seems that sales are gradually increasing each month, which is good.  There’s quite a delay between the orders being placed and money reaching me — at least 3 months — but the money for June and July has now arrived.  Of course those months were early days and the sales were fairly small numbers, but at least some money is now coming in.  It’s fairly clear, though, that by 5th April the project will still be in debit, but perhaps not by as much as I had feared. 

So, if you need a Christmas present for the patristic scholar in your life, why not buy him a copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk?  (sorry to bang the drum a little: I’m not that good at this marketing stuff, but even I know that Christmas is coming).

A correspondent has been pointing out various errata and corrigenda in the GCS page that I’ve set up.  I must look some more at this.

If the sun ever comes out — it’s been dull here for five days now — I shall do a trip up to Cambridge University Library.

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Converting DjVu into PDF

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The volumes of the GCS at the Kaiser Wilhelm Library in Posen in Poland are in .DjVu format, which is rather inconvenient.  So today I have been looking at whether it is possible to convert them to PDF.  I’ve had some success, I must say.

I obtained a copy of IrfanView from the web.  You need the basic .exe download, but also the plugins, because one of these makes it possible to work with .djvu files.

Once I had installed this, I opened the index.djvu for one of the GCS volumes.  This in fact opened all the files, as it does in the DjVu reader.  I then followed the instructions here:

1) With “IrFanView” go to “File->Print” or ‘Ctrl+p’

2) On the window select “Printer: Adobe PDF”, hit “Printer setup” for the paper size you want, etc…., in the middle of that window says “”Print size” select “Best fit to page(aspect ratio)”

3) On the right side of that window you will see the Preview, under preview is “Multiple images” select “Print all pages”

4) When you’re finished hit “Print” and is going to ask you the name of file you want to save it.

And that’s it!! after severals minutes (i think hours, depending on how many images the DJVU file has) you’re going to have a PDF file with the info you want!

But it doesn’t take hours.  However I did run into a glitch: I got this error:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[Page: 1]%%
%%[Page: 2]%%
%%[Page: 3]%%
%%[Page: 4]%%
%%[Page: 5]%%
%%[Page: 6]%%
%%[Page: 7]%%
%%[Page: 8]%%
%%[Page: 9]%%
%%[Page: 10]%%
%%[Page: 11]%%
%%[Page: 12]%%
%%[Page: 13]%%
%%[Page: 14]%%
%%[Page: 15]%%
%%[Page: 16]%%
%%[Page: 17]%%
%%[ Error: invalidfileaccess; OffendingCommand: showpage ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

A bit of hunting around revealed an answer:

… the issue appears to be with my Kaspersky Anti-Virus software. By setting a check mark against most of the exclusions in the Kaspersky application control for Acrobat Distiller everything now seems to be working OK.

I.e. in Settings … Application Control … Applications … (long pause when you hit that button!) … ADOBE SYSTEMS, then right-click on Acrobat Distiller, Application Rules … Exclusions, and check everything except “Do not scan network traffic”.

This worked; and Irfanview ran through 500+ pages and created a perfectly good PDF, some 500Mb in size.

The only downside is that I ended up with a white margin on the right and bottom, where the image was padded out to A4 (or whatever).  Nothing I could do would change that.  Probably I just haven’t got the settings just right.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Thankfully my PC decided that it would boot second time around.  Windows is quite an unstable platform these days, I find.

A correspondent writes that there is now OCR software available which can recognise Arabic.  It’s sold by Novodynamics of Michigan and called “Verus”.  Sadly it is ridiculously expensive — $1300 for the “standard edition” and they don’t dare print a price for the “professional edition”. 

An extraordinarily advanced OCR solution, VERUS™ Professional provides the most innovative Middle Eastern language and Asian optical character recognition in the world. VERUS™ Middle East Professional recognizes Arabic, Persian (Farsi, Dari), Pashto, Urdu, including embedded English and French. It also recognizes the Hebrew language, including embedded English. VERUS™ Asia Professional provides support for both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean and Russian languages, including embedded English. Both products automatically detect and clean degraded and skewed documents, automatically identify a page’s primary language, and recognize a page’s fonts without manual intervention. VERUS’™ intuitive user interface allows users to quickly review and edit recognized text.

http://www.novodynamics.com/verus_pro.htm

I would imagine that it should be possible to adapt this software to recognise Syriac, if the manufacturer would agree.

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