Bowerbird,<div><br></div><div>I&#39;m not exactly sure what &quot;start from scratch and do the job correctly&quot; would mean in my case.  I do not own and don&#39;t intend to buy ABBYY Fine Reader.  I did attempt to make my own page-at-a-time OCR with Tesseract and the ABBYY OCR from <a href="http://archive.org">archive.org</a> was far, far better.  Obviously room for improvement, but much better than what I started with.  Putting in em-dashes and accents is painful, but realistically what alternative do I have?</div>
<div><br></div><div>My understanding of what you&#39;re currently trying to do is get my partially corrected text to match line-by-line and page-by-page with the page images.  Once you have that I&#39;m supposed to go through page by page and change the text to look exactly like the page images.  I add underscores for italics, but I do not re-wrap the text, remove page numbers, join paragraphs split between pages, or anything else I&#39;ve been doing so far.  I just correct spelling and accents.</div>
<div><br></div><div>After I&#39;ve done all that I go back and put in the ZML stuff like extra blank lines for page headings.  Then the magic happens and we get several formats of the book from one source.  I&#39;m not entirely clear on that part.</div>
<div><br></div><div>James Simmons</div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 2:59 PM,  <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:Bowerbird@aol.com">Bowerbird@aol.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<font face="arial,helvetica"><font color="#000000" face="Lucida Grande" lang="0" size="4">james-<br>
<br>
work is coming along fine on the file, but i&#39;m sorry that<br>
i haven&#39;t gotten it turned back to you sooner than this...<br>
<br>
i got caught up in some other things, plus the clean-up<br>
is taking longer than i&#39;d hoped it would, mostly because<br>
the typography of the book r</font><font color="#000000" face="Lucida Grande" lang="0" size="4">eally </font><font color="#000000" face="Lucida Grande" lang="0" size="4">wasn&#39;t quite up to snuff.<br>
<br>
in the meantime, you can always work on the family-trees.<br>
<br>
***<br>
<br>
to make this post more widely applicable, i can probably<br>
reiterate the point i usually describe at the very beginning:<br>
take care to select a well-done book which will scan nicely.<br>
or, if you&#39;re using pre-existing o.c.r., make sure it&#39;s good.<br>
<br>
otherwise, you might well have to spend a lot more time.<br>
<br>
for instance, on this book which james is digitizing now,<br>
he faces the triple whammy -- poor p-book typography,<br>
bad scans, and internet archive&#39;s careless text handling<br>
(where the book is missing em-dashes, utf8, and italics).<br>
<br>
so even after all the time he and i have spent cleaning it,<br>
my guess is that he would still be finished with it sooner<br>
if he were to start from scratch and do the job correctly...<br>
<br>
-bowerbird<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br></div>