On Jan 21, 2008 6:27 PM, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) pathoschild@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I'm just wondering, would it be feasible to convert wiki text (without OCR markup) back into OCR markup? A script might strip or convert markup, diff the original OCR text with the wiki text to determine what goes where, and generate the markup from scratch.
You could thus cleanly convert from OCR markup to wiki markup and back without unreadable OCR markup on the wiki, and this could also be used to provide some other very useful features (I would love to accurately diff an entire Wikisource text with OCR scans of different printed documents, for example).
Getting the edge cases right would be hard to impossible... For example the OCR reads "the ball bounced and" "saw it hit the floor" .. you fix a missing word: "the ball bounced and I saw it hit the floor" ... What line is the I on in the OCR output?
The nice things about spans are they are invisible in the output.. you should be able to preserve them while doing all the markup you want. The bad thing is that they are visible while editing (but could be hidden), and are a pain to fix if the OCR was very wrong.