hashem@mars.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Basil Hashem) (12/14/89)
First, I'd like to commend all of you on your efforts, may they be rewarded. = 1) Is there interest in this project? Who would be willing = to contribute typing time? How much time could they afford to = spend? = I would be more than willing to spend some time (say < 10 hrs) entering and proof-reading some copies. = 2) What English translation of the Qur'an should we choose? As to which translation, I propose we use Muhammad Asad's version. It reads well and I consider it modern. [It is copyrighted so we cannot use it. --Naim] ## 1) Somebody with access to a scanner can scan in a whole translation. ## This would ensure accuracy and also capture the Arabic text. However ## the resultant output would be a bitmap image rather than ASCII text. ## It would only be viewable on workstation monitors. -- Not necessarily true, there a quite a few OCR packages that may be able -- to pull the text off a bitmap image and produce ascii text. These are -- not cheap, and they are not perfect, but they do work. Anyone have access -- to one where you can selectively box the area of the image that you want -- to convert to ascii? The Islamic Center of Southern California - Los Angeles has an HP scanner connected to a Mac II. The Center also owns an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software package. Unfortunately, I cannot donate on behalf of the Center the use of these tools but I have contacts that I will call and see what services they can provide. I will keep you informed about my progress. ## ## 2) ... Every pair of outputs can be compared using UNIX text processing ## tools to detect differences (there are variants of diff around that can do ## this). I believe doing diff's on people's work would be an excellent idea! So let's get started, inshallah.