Obras Clasicas sobre la Lengua Nahuatl

[Lynda Manning-Schwartz]

The way to translate scanned images into text is to use OCR (Optical
Character Recognition) software. Unfortunately, while OCR software has come
a long way in functionality in the last five or so years, it is still
relatively limited in scope. It reads only certain printed fonts and only
if they are very clearly arranged, easy to read, and conform to industry
standards. Handwriting is still only barely possible (the Apple Newton got
jibes a few years ago for its valiant but only partially successful first
attempt at reading its owner's handwriting, but it was at least a somewhat
succesful attempt for an OCR program to "learn" to read nonstandard text).

The only way at the moment to turn handwritten, scanned images (especially
ones with aberrant spellings and/or penmanship) would be to type the text
into a word processor. For future use, keep watching software company
blurbs. Someday (hopefully in the next couple of years) an OCR program will
come out that will be able to "learn" handwriting. They you can "teach" it
to read almost any text. Until then, we're not quite in the stone age on
this topic, but close.

A possible alternative would be to use the new spoken software and read the
text in. This would take a lot of corrections, however, and a word
processor that writes in international characters easily. This would not
produce text that looked like the original, however. Aberrant spellings and
obsolete words would be deleted or randomly changed to a modern equivalent
the computer's modern dictionary knew.

Good luck. If you find a viable solution, I would be interested in the
method. I am also looking for viable alternatives to typing in old
manuscript text.

Lynda Manning-Schwartz
Population Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin

At 04:09 PM 7/2/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've installed the Digibis CD-Rom edited by Ascension Hernandez de Leon
>Portilla, and I'm impressed with the work.  The scanned images are reasonably
>clear and can be adjusted.  I was hoping that I could integrate this CD with
>other programs to manipulate the text, i.e. I was hoping to be able to search
>the contents.  Does anyone have ideas of how to make text files of these
>fascimiles or otherwise manipulate their contents?
>
>Tlazocamati,
>Mark Morris
>
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