I agree with Alex, the xml is not about getting editors to work with it, but to improve the output of the text. If it can be combined with the Visual Editor to add some pre-formatting and maybe signaling which words are unclear, that would be already a big improvement.

If in addition to that, it can be used to compare proofread text with ocr text for remapping purposes, even better.

Micru

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps there's a misinterpretation - I mentioned abbyy.xml but with no project to import it as-it-is; abbyy.xml is only a surprising data container from which extract anything useful to speed up proofreading (and formatting) - nothing more than this. 

Just an example: vertical djvu coordinates of lines can be used to get font-size; horizontal coordinates of lines can be used to recognize  centered text; paragraphs splitting is valuable; coolumns can be recognized; margin too; with some effort probably poems can pop up.

Far from simply importing  coordinates, it's a matter of use them at our best; no data, no data information contents.  

Alex


2013/7/17 Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se>
On 07/17/2013 12:57 PM, Alex Brollo wrote:
FineReader OCR stores an incredibly detailed information in [...] abbyy.xml

In the other end, Wikisource is a wiki that edits wiki text.
Sure, you could insert the XML there and let users
edit the XML, but that would scare more users away
and allow for more mistakes.

For example, if proofreading Hamlet,

  To be or not to bc, that is the question,

anybody can easily spot "bc" and correct that.
In the XML version,

 <word x=1 y=1>To</word>
 <word x=5 y=1>be</word>
 <word x=8 y=1>or</word>

someone might think that "or" should be a litte more
to the right, so one user inserts a space between the
tag "<word x=8 y=1>" and "or", while another user
adjusts the tag to "<word x=9 y=1>". All the tags
make it harder to spot the OCR error "bc".

Even if you replace manual XML editing with some
graphic tool, you get the same ambiguity between
adding whitespace and adjusting coordinates.

This is a nightmare that we avoid by throwing away
all the coordinates and just proofreading the plain text.
It is not the perfect system, it's a compromise, in
order to get some useful work done.


--
  Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/



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