11.0374 Optopus

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Sat, 1 Nov 1997 17:04:47 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 374.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: Fotis Jannidis <Fotis.Jannidis@lrz.uni- (25)
muenchen.de>
Subject: Optopus?

[2] From: Friedrich.Heberlein@ku-eichstaett.de (25)
Subject: Re: 11.0365 obey or agree? Optopus?

[3] From: Mavis Cournane <cournane@imbolc.ucc.ie> (15)
Subject: Optopus

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 20:13:43 +0000
From: Fotis Jannidis <Fotis.Jannidis@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Subject: Optopus?

> I would like to know, please:
> 1. if OPTOPUS is an OCR concerning latin and greek texts;
Optopus can and has to be trained for every new text/font. The plus
is: you can teach the software to read cyrillic or greek, but you
have to train every font. So it is best used together with an
omnifont OCR software.
> 2. how much it costs?
some thousand deutsch mark
> 3. is there an electronic latin dictionary to be used with an OCR or a
> Wordprocessor?
Not with the standard package.

In my experience optopus is quite unstable on windows 95. Our copy
is on a "normal" windows 95 PC** so unstable that real work is
impossible. Their technical service was helpful and send us a new
version, but it didn't help. On the other hand on another system
it may work.
Hope this helps,
Fotis Jannidis

**A Compaq with 32 RAM, ca. 2 GB HD and a HP Scanjet 4
________________________________________
Dr. Fotis Jannidis
Institut fuer Deutsche Philologie
LM Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Schellingstr. 3 /RG * D-80799 Muenchen
Fx: -49-89-2180-3871
http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 00:55:30 +1
From: Friedrich.Heberlein@ku-eichstaett.de
Subject: Re: 11.0365 obey or agree? Optopus?

As to 3.: I'm afraid the thing you are looking for,
i.e. a dictionary comprising all the possible forms of a given lexem,
does not exist. If you are looking for a lemma list, there is the
well known one of father Roberto Busa (Forcellini), which is
available on several ftp sites.
Prof Denooz of the university of Liege (LASA/CIPL, http://www.ulg.ac.be/cipl/lslbdlla.htm)
has written a program "ANALYSE" , the main components of which are
a latin lexicon and a archetypic "grammar" . It is able to identify
a good deal of the text forms it scans.
Unfortuately, LASLA seems to have changed its distribution policy and the program
is not available any more (but may be you are luckier than me....)

Fritz Heberlein

Dr. Friedrich Heberlein, AkadDir
Dept. of Classics
KU Eichstaett
Ostenstr. 26-28
D-85071 Eichstaett

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 29 Oct 1997 13:08:05 +0000 (GMT)
From: Mavis Cournane <cournane@imbolc.ucc.ie>
Subject: Optopus

> 1. if OPTOPUS is an OCR concerning latin and greek texts;

Optopus is a trainable OCR system and yes it can handle non-latin
alphabets. It is manufactured by Makrolog in Wiesbaden, Germany. You can
find their webpage at
http://www.makrolog.com/
There is also an optopus users mailing list which you can subscribe to and
post a query there. To subscribe to this list send the following message
to listserv@listserv.hea.ie
with the following command:
sub OPTO-L _Your Name_

I have been working for a project that has used Optopus for OCRing medieval
Irish text with an ornate Celtic script. We found it very good.

I hope this helps

Mavis Cournane
University College Cork
Ireland

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