I'm forwarding this message by George Orwell III on en-ws [1]. I think it is extremely important as it offers an insight about what is wrong with Djvu handling on Wikisource.


"We/you are losing the X-min, Y-min, X-Max & Y-max (mapping coordinates) because the original PHP contributing a-hole for the DjVu routine on our servers never bothered to finish the part where the internal DjVu text layer is converted to a (coordinate rich) XML file using the existing DjVuLibre software package because, at the time, the software had issues.

"That faulty DjVuLibre version was the equivalent of 4,317 versions ago and the issue has been long fixed now EXCEPT that the .DTD file needed to base the plain-text to XML conversion on still has the wrong 'folder path' on local DjVuLibre installs (if this is true on server installs as well, I cannot say for sure). Once I copied the folder to the [wrong] folder path, I was able to generate the XMLs all day long. These XMLs are just like the ones IA generates during their process (in addition to the XML that AABBY generates for them).

"So its not that we as a community decided not to follow through with (coordinate rich) XML generation but got stuck with the plain-text dump workaround due to a DjVuLibre problem that no longer exists. Plus, the guy who created the beginnings of this fabulous disaster was like tick with an attention span deficit and moved on to conjuring up some other blasted thing or another instead of following up on his own workaround & finish the XML coding portion once DjVuLibre glitch was fixed. -- 15:16, 15 July 2013 (UTC)


[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#EPUB.2FHTML_to_Wikitext

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 6:57 AM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a brief comment about djvu text layer, using IA files to digging deeper the topic.

FineReader OCR stores an incredibly detailed information in a proprietary format; then, various FineReader versions export something of this extremely rich set of information into different outputs - one of them being djvu text layer. It's worth to note that even if any information stored into djvu text layer can be extracted and used, the set of information wrapped into djvu text layer (both in lisp-like format or in xml format) is only a minor subset of original OCR information.

If someone is interested to get much more information, it can find it into abbyy.xml output; and Internet Archive gives it as abbyy.gz into the list of exportable files. It's a very heavy and complex xml structure but it is possible to parse it, end to extract from it any information wrapped into djvu text layer and much more - most interestingly, wortPenalty, that is, word by word, the resume of degree of incertainty of OCR recognition of the whole word.

We (I and Aarti) are digging into this mess, with fast preliminary results; you can see into [[it:w:Utente:Alex brollo/Sandbox]] some brief pieces of text extracted from abbyy.gx, where doubtful  words (in the opinion of OCR software) are red. They can be easily managed by VisualEditor - caming simply from a simple span tag.

Now, I'm waiting dor Aarti work; as soon a VisualEditor for nsPage will run, it would be possible to extract text by bot from abbyy.gz (if the work comes from IA) and to upload such text as OCR.

Alex



2013/7/16 David Cuenca <dacuetu@gmail.com>
Hi Aubrey,
Thanks for the heads-up, I have CC'ed Sébastien from fr-ws, he worked on the djvu text extraction/merging and he was interested in following-up on that. Maybe he has some fresh ideas about it.

Micru

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi David, Aarti, thibaud and Tpt, 
please look at this thread:
especially the last message. 

It seems George Orwell III knows his stuff about Djvu and Proofread extension, 
and it's probably worth digging into this "layer text" djvu thing. 

Even if I might dream of an ideal solution (a "layered structure" for wikisource, in which text can marked up several times in different layers) that is probably very far away.

But it's still important to pave the way for further improvements, I guess:
losing all the information from a formatted, mapped IA djvu it's not a good thing to do, IMHO.
And the Visual Editor could help us, in the future, to keep some of that information (italics, bold, etc.)

I know Aarti spoke with Alex about abbyy.xml: is it possible to do something with it?

Aubrey  



--
Etiamsi omnes, ego non
_______________________________________________
Wikisource-l mailing list
Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l



_______________________________________________
Wikisource-l mailing list
Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l




--
Etiamsi omnes, ego non