From my diary

I pulled up the OCR project for the Book of Asaph the physician in Finereader 11 this lunchtime.  It’s a 6th century Jewish medical text, which apparently contains interesting quotes from classical writers.

Readers may remember — I can hardly remember myself — that I was experimenting with deskewing the pages, increasing the brightness, etc, in order to improve OCR.

Pretty much the last thing that I did was to open the PDF and import it into FR11, without doing any work.  I ran the OCR anyway, just to see what the raw result would look like.

The raw result is certainly better than some of the rubbish that I have had to clean up in the past.  But it is far from simple.  I think deskewing etc would be the answer.  However there are 250 pages to do, one at a time.   It might be a gentle task to do some time.

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3 thoughts on “From my diary

  1. I am very interested in this book. May I help you with it?
    Sincerely,
    Seth Feltheimer

  2. I am also very interested in this translation when you have it done, or if you need help to get it done

    Have tried to get the S Muntner and Rosner translation
    but not available in book form anymore that I can find
    If you have a link to get that also I would much
    appreciate it (or is this it?)

  3. This is the Muntner and Rosner translation. It was never published, and exists in typescript at the US National Library of Medicine. I have photographs of the typescript (no thanks to the NLM). But it ought to be possible to obtain a copy from them.

    Can I ask what your interest is? I’m not sure that I shall ever do much with this.

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