3.724 Corre on ICON; multilingual coding; OCR (142)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Thu, 9 Nov 89 19:07:50 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 724. Thursday, 9 Nov 1989.


(1) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 89 11:20:11 -0600 (37 lines)
From: Alan D Corre <corre@csd4.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Recent publications

(2) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 89 09:29 (33 lines)
From: Wujastyk (on GEC 4190 Rim-D at UCL) <UCGADKW@EUCLID.UCL.AC.UK>
Subject: multilingual character set coding

(3) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 89 12:55 EST (47 lines)
From: <ERDT@VUVAXCOM> (Terrence Erdt)
Subject: for Humanist: OCR, new products

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 89 11:20:11 -0600
From: Alan D Corre <corre@csd4.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Recent publications


Prentice Hall has published
*Icon Programming for Humanists* by Alan D. Corre.

Icon is the programming language of choice for applications in the
humanities. An ideal option for those whose main interest or research
areas is the written word, Icon emphasizes proper programming
principles; and at the same time strikes a reasonable balance between
structure and freedom. Icon Programming for Humanists teaches the
principles of the Icon language in a very task-oriented fashion. This
book emphasizes project that might interest the student of texts and
language, and Icon features are instilled incidentally to this. To aid
the learning process, actual program are exemplified and analysed to
provide illustrations that readers can imitate and apply to their own
projects and programs.

Icon Programming for Humanists is available through any bookstore.


The Language Resource Center of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
has published
A Diskionary and Chrestomathy of Modern Literary Judeo-Arabic by
Alan D. Corre

The diskionary consists of a set of disks that may be used in a two-
floppy IBM true compatible or may be transferred to a hard disk. The
price is $79.95 including postage and handling. Wisconsin residents add
5% tax.
Write to
LRC Software
Language Resource Center
PO Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------45----
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 89 09:29
From: Wujastyk (on GEC 4190 Rim-D at UCL) <UCGADKW@EUCLID.UCL.AC.UK>
Subject: multilingual character set coding

HUMANISTS will remember that there was a discussion here in the spring
of this year about the coding of Sanskrit and Pali. Several ISO and
ANSI standards were mentioned, as well as TeX and SGML, etc.

I have just become aware that the ubiquitous Kermit program is
in the process of bootstrapping itself into the multilingual world.
It appears that an extremely interesting and well informed discussion
has taken place about all the same issues of multilingual
character set coding, in relation to file transfer using Kermit.

A document entitled "A Kermit Protocol Extension for International
Character Sets" is currently in its 4th draft (August 24, 1989),
and I would strongly recommend this essay to anyone interested in
these issues. The appendixes, listing and summarizing the ISO
documents, is exceptionally lucid and helpful.

I found this and other related documents on the Lancaster PDsoft
archive, on the British Janet network (kermit/misc/iso, I think it
was). If you can't find this material anywhere FTPable, you could write to

Christine Gianone,
Manager, Kermit Development and Distribution,
Columbia Univ. Center for Computing Activities,
612 West 115th Street,
New York, NY 10025, USA.


Dominik Wujastyk

(3) --------------------------------------------------------------51----
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 89 12:55 EST
From: <ERDT@VUVAXCOM> (Terrence Erdt)
Subject: for Humanist: OCR, new products

The National Sales Manager for Kurzweil passed on to
me several tidbits that may interest humanists. First,
Kurzweil 4000 owners will be offered a $3000.00
discount on the new model 5100. The lure is this: the
value of the discount added to the cost for a two year service
contract for the 4000 adds up to the current price for the
5100. Of course, there is still the matter of the service
contract for the 5000.

Kurzweil will soon begin selling a software OCR system to
run on PS/2's.

Kurzweil has bought the company that
produces "I recognize," an editing program that works with
the Calera Truescan system. I have worked with the application,
and it shows promise: with it you can more easily compare the
orginal image of a scanned document with the product of the
ICR process.

Perhaps someone involved with the Text Encoding Initiative
could assess the importance of the U.S. Department of Defenses
adoption of the CALS mark-up system. Kurzweil's products are
being designed to work with the system, I was told.
How adequate is it?

I suggested to the gentleman from Kurzweil that scanners
with ICR units eventually ought to be combined with
the photocopy machine.

"Don't tell anyone," the gentleman from Kurzweil said. "Xerox
[Kurzweil's parent company] is working on it."


Terry Erdt


Terrence Erdt, Ph.D.
Associate Editor
Computers and the Humanities
Grad. Dept. of Library Science
Villanova University
Villanova PA 19085
USA ERDT@VUVAXCOM (215) 645-4670