On another note...

...does anyone know how to add a Paypal widgit to a blog? I'd like to give anyone so moved the opportunity to help support the work as it goes forward. I hope to use some Latin students from GVSU to aid in the translation, for example, and it would be nice to offer some stipend, however minimal.

To scan or to type...

...that is the question, as I noted in a previous post.

This morning I typed in four pages.

Then I scanned the same four pages with Omnipage 14 (the OCR program I have).

There's no question that typing 1100 pages by hand would be a tedious endeavor.

But the OCR is tedious, too, and much more prone to errors than simply typing it out.

Several things lead to problems. First, the OCR program has trouble distinguishing between "f" and the 17th-century elongated "s", among some other letter combinations. Second, there's a fair amount of 'noise' (stray marks) which the OCR program wants to read as commas, periods etc. So even if the letter scanning were nearly 100% perfect, I'd still have to go through the whole thing again and fix the punctuation.

Maybe I should forget about trying to produce a machine-readable Latin text, and simply translate from the scans? Or separate the two endeavors, working more on the translation and do transcription as I have time?

Your input is welcome as always...