Just to fix our present thoughts/"discoveries". 

1. ABBYY OCR procedure outputs _abbyy.xml file, containing any detail about multi-level text structure and detailed information, character by character, about formatting and recognition quality; _abbyy.xml file is published by IA as _abbyy.gz file;

2. some of _abbyy.xml data are wrapped into IA djvu text layer; multi-layer structure is saved, but details about characters are discarded;

3. MediaWiki gets the "pure text" from djvu text layer, and discards all other data multi-layer data of djvu layer, and loads the text into new nsPage pages;

4. finally & painfully wikisource users then add formatting  again into raw text; in a large extent, they re-build by scratch some of data that was present into original, source abbyy.xml file and - in part - into djvu text layer. :-(

This seems deeply unsound IMHO; isn't it? 

Alex

2013/6/17 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com>

This is a link to drag into abbyy xml: http://www.abbyy-developers.com/en:tech:features:xml

It' very exciting, and far from so exoteric as it seems at a first look. Perhaps abbyy xml could be used as the main source of usable OCR data in proofread procedure (abbyy.gz file is listed into any OCR-ed Internet Archive book, and it is possible to get OCR with python routines: take a look to http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Indice:Fisiologia_del_matrimonio.djvu, a test book where pages 17-30 come just from abbyy.xml file). 

Alex

2013/6/15 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com>

I got it. o_O

No need of regex, lxml, pyquery nor XLST.... most simple python parsing routines can understand abbyy xml and extract both text and informations about text. 

The goal was, to get by python both plain text (the same produced by wikisource server when creating a new page from a djvu text layer) and some html formatting, into a format usable by VisualEditor; and if you take a look to http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Alex_brollo/Sandbox, you'll see in red only owrds, where parameter wordPenalty is more than 0 into the source file abbyy xml. 

Alex brollo (from it.wikisource)

2013/6/14 Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com>

IA gives abbyy xml files too (as .gz files); I opened one of them after a suggestion of Phe, and I'm dreaming about extracting anything useful to help proofreading. The only "small" problem is that I barely know what a xml is and that is similat to html in its (well-formed) structure, and that something called XLST exists. :-(

Is any of you working about abbyy xml files with a "little bit" of more skill? 

Alex brollo

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