Firefox 3.6 in Ubuntu

One problem with Linux is that it's common that the latest releases of cross-platform applications aren't easily available or as easily installed as on Mac and Windows computers, as Preston Gralla recently observed. Although I would dearly like to have disagreed with him, I have to say that after two unsuccessful attempts to install the recently released Firefox 3.6 using two different sets of instructions, I have to agree he's got a point. Although I succeeded with the directions here, I didn't know that I had without logging in and out, something I guessed at rather than was told. Other than that it was, as promised, "super easy": three simple steps with a few "y"s and a password.

My consistent experience is that Ubuntu is excellent for most purposes for "ordinary" users if you don't want to do anything unusual, including installing the latest versions of some software (Firefox and TeX Live among them). If you do, you may get lucky and be able to find instructions that will work the first time around; if not, possibly the second or third. But — and this is something I think about both Mac OS X and Windows — it really doesn't seem like it should be this hard. There are certain things I prefer about Ubuntu's software installation: Opening up a Terminal window and typing sudo apt-get install [whatever] works surprisingly often and is even easier than the process of finding and installing new software in Mac OS X and (in my very limited experience) Windows. But why can't it always be easy?

In my work as de facto tech support where I work (the one-eyed man among the more-or-less blind) when I look at what I have to do to fix even some simple things, things that I do so commonly they've often become second-nature to me at this point, I realize that to ordinary users they're entirely unintuitive. Admittedly complexity is a price that must be paid for power, but does so much have to be that complex? Well, maybe someday; here we are in 2010 and I still don't have my jet pack, after all.

Tesseract OCR

Optical character recognition is a useful capability to have and although I have it on my Mac thanks to the bundleware software, OmniPage SE, included on the CD that came with my flatbed scanner, I naturally wanted to be able to do the same on my Linux machine too. A search quickly turned up Tesseract as the best option for Linux and although for some reason the new-to-Karmic Ubuntu Software Center didn't turn it up, Synaptic Package Manager did and helpfully made sure I had everything I needed in the way of related packages.

There's a passage in Suetonius in which Hyginus' life gets a paragraph treatment, and although the English has been transcribed at Lacus Curtius from an old Loeb, the Latin hasn't been - at least there; at first I didn't search too far for a text version because I wanted an excuse to try out Tesseract on a text image and Google Books has kindly put that same Loeb volume on-line with both Latin and English.

I started off using GIMP to take a screen shot of the text at the Lacus Curtius site. There are a bunch of options out there for partial and full screen shots but GIMP lets you fiddle with the image to make it more readable and save it as the .tif that Tesseract requires. It was nice and easy in Gimp, too: File -> Create -> Screen Shot, followed by saving as an uncompressed .tif.

Tesseract is a command line utility with a simple syntax: tesseract [image file] [what you want to call the file with the OCR results]; in Ubuntu you can drag the file's icon from a File Browser (=Mac OS X's Finder) to provide Terminal with the correct path. The file with the results is put in your current working directory (i.e., your user folder unless you've changed directories since starting this Terminal session) and the file name you choose for your output will be provided with a .txt suffix automatically.

I did all this and got, well, dismal results, although by squinting you can see some resemblance between the original and what it produced. Here's the first line:

111.:.22 ¤|:Z ln» |1mH·| (3ai11s -111`Ii11s I—Iy*gi1111s., a f1`eecl111a11 c»f 4\11g11st11s a

I remembered in my researches that I'd come across some advice on processing a text image before running it through Tesseract although I'd thought it wouldn't be necessary clearly something had to be done and I decided this was a promising next step. I followed steps 4.2-3 (4.1 wasn't necessary) and ran it through again and this time:

20 EI Gaius Julius Hrginus, a freednian of Augustus and a Spaniard by birth (some think that he was a native of Ale·<andria and was brought to Rome when a boy by

Not bad, not bad at all.

And how did it work on the Latin from the Loeb image?

XX. C. lulius Hyginus, Augusti libertus, naticnc
Hispanus, (nnnnulli Alexandrinum pumnt et .1
Caesarc pucmm Rnmmn adductum Alexandria cupta)

Not so great. Maybe undoing and redoing, plus increasing the Threshold (Tools->Color Tools->Threshold...) as suggested at the page above?

XX. C. Iulius Hyginus, Augusti libertus, nntiune
Hispmus, (nnunulli Alcxandrinum putunt ct a
Caesar: pucrum Rumsm adductum Alcxandrin capta)

Some gains, some losses. Overall about a wash. A little disappointing since the text was fairly clear as scans of hundred-year-old books go, still probably a little better than retyping de novo.

All in all, I'm satisfied if not delighted.

Punctuation and Diacriticals in Ubuntu

One hope — one might even call it a resolution — for this year is to get my Hyginus project published in some form. I'm fairly close to finishing my mark-up of the text into XeLaTeX, which is tedious but can't easily be automated. After that I plan to do a thorough revision with more comments in the source file and to check for additions to the literature on the Fabulae published since I finished the original version in AppleWorks (which was long enough ago that the application had stopped being developed but Apple hadn't yet totally pulled the plug on it).

Since I'm also hoping to learn more about Linux, I'm working on this project mostly on my ThinkPad rather than my Mac. Since I'm also continuing my quest to make the key commands of Vim second-nature so it will be in practice and not just in theory faster than a conventional text editor, I've been doing my mark-up using that editor; some time ago I started using it and added useful macros for LaTeX mark-up to my .vimrc file so I can add a variety of tags and move to the next line with easy pairs of keystrokes.

A few days ago while writing HTML mark-up in Vim for my day job, I was reminded again that I wasn't able to do my usual find-and-replace for single and double curly (a.k.a. "smart") quotes; in the past I've shrugged my shoulders and opened the file with gedit and used its more obvious interface to switch them. In Mac OS X you can type those curly characters easily with combinations of option, shift, and square brackets, but those particular key combinations don't work the same way in Ubuntu (or possibly Gnome or Linux in general). The obvious solution of copying and pasting that I use in my favorite mouse-centric Mac text editor, Smultron (sadly no longer under development), is foiled by Vim's modal nature: hitting p to paste simply types "p" into the find space in a substitute command. What to do?

After using gedit to clean up my work code and uploading the file, I remembered that sometime in the past I'd seen a Vim command that would provide information about a character under the cursor. A few seconds' search turned it up: ga. Now, would it be possible to use that information to type a character not transparently accessible?

As it turns out, yes, although it wasn't as obvious as it might have been. Using ga prints a line at the bottom of the window like this one for a question mark:


63, Hex 3f, Octal 077


Checking charts of code points it turned out that 63 is the decimal value of the question mark. I eventually found in the Vim documentation that using Control-V, with or without an additional letter, would let me type any character I wanted if I knew its code points; Control-V u, 16-bit hexadecimal, is most useful because — if my understanding of Unicode code ranges is correct — it'll work for any Western language.

Turning to Hyginus, the challenge there lies in producing macrons. One of the first things I did when I installed Ubuntu was to try to figure out how to add diacritical marks like accents, and I learned quickly that it's necessary to select a modifier key in System->Preferences->Keyboard->Layouts->Layout Options->Compose Key Position, which gives you seven options (although my keyboard lacks two of the choices). I picked the right control key and that's worked well for me. Key combinations for common (and some uncommon, like the dot-less i, ı, used in Turkish) Latin alphabet diacriticals are explained at this helpful page but macrons are not among those listed.

I found a partial answer by looking inside my /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose file: macrons are made by using the compose key and underscores. However, oddly, using the same keystrokes that successfully overline e, i, u, and y, a and o are instead transformed into the feminine and masculine ordinal indicators, small superscript letters that are underlined in some fonts as well. Unfortunately I'm not able to interpret the Compose file, which is not transparent in its meaning.

Interestingly, e, i, and u are all overlined by right-control--hyphen as well as by right-control--underscore (i.e., the shift key isn't necessary), but to overline y the shift key has to be used or the Japanese yen currency character is produced.

Fortunately, there's a simple solution for macrons for the 5 common vowels: switching to the Maori keyboard, a trick I learned from an early version of Mac OS X. Adding the Maori keyboard is pretty simple: System->Preferences->Keyboard->Layouts->Add...

And that's a handy ellipsis, because it inspired me to think to check whether Ubuntu might include something comparable to OS X's US Extended keyboard, and in fact there's a "USA International (with dead keys)" which creates macrons for all 5 vowels the way I´d expected. On the other hand, it also requires use of the right ALT key to create single and double straight quotes, so it's a mixed blessing.

Next layout research project? Polytonic Greek, which is apparently not well-served in its ancient form by the built-in "Greece Polytonic" keyboard. I'll probably start here.

Google Chrome

Having tried out Google Chrome in its semi-native version (Windows 7 beta in VMWare Fusion on my Mac) I decided a few weeks ago to try out the Mac dev version. It installed fine and is fast and stable and has worked well for most although not all web sites. Today I decided to get the Linux version and after checking for a package with Synaptic - not there, as I suspected would be the case - I found a direct download at Google of a .deb file. It was one of the many cases of a Linux install being just as easy as in OS X: click to download, enter the system password when it's finished, click a few buttons and it appeared in my Applications->Internet menu. So far it seems fine (unlike Firefox, it works with the Last.fm web site) and it's nice to have yet another browser to choose from.

The one problem was in importing bookmarks. Today I also finally got around to installing Xmarks and signing up so I could merge and synchronize my bookmarks on my two personal machines. That eventually worked out fine, but I wasn't able to find where bookmarks were stored on my Jaunty machine. Both bookmarks.html files I found included only the handful of default bookmarks that came with the basic installation. I still have no idea where they are, but I eventually learned that by going into the Firefox menus in Bookmarks->Organize bookmarks... it's possible to export them as a file and then import them into Chrome.

I'm not giving up Firefox as my default browser, but Chrome is an attractive fast alternative.

Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary

Thanks to A Third Way the old but comprehensive Lewis and Short Latin dictionary is now available in two more forms: both through a web interface and as a stand-alone Adobe AIR desktop application. The web interface joins Perseus at Tufts University, Perseus under Philologic at the University of Chicago, the Archimedes Project at Harvard, and the stand-alone joins the cross-platform Diogenes application.

I tested the web site with Firefox on my Mac (OS 10.5) and with Opera in Ubuntu Jaunty and the AIR app on both machines and it installed and ran flawlessly. Although it doesn't work with inflected forms, it provides a list of the ten entries before and after your entry so as long as the word you're looking for begins the same odds are good you'll find what you're looking for; when an entry for an irregular form is provided (e.g., tuli, lātus, the third and fourth principal parts of ferō), if the original dictionary includes a cross-reference it's provided, but not as a link. As with the other electronic versions and the print, macrons are shown for the main entry but not in the quotations. Search terms cannot include macrons (and in fact the not-found mālum was located at the very end of the M section in the context list of 20 rather than among the ma's), but entries without them generate results for words both with and without.

This is a 0.2 alpha version, and they write of their plans:

We are busy cataloging every word in the dictionary as to its part of speech, declension or conjugation, gender, and other grammatical information. In the future, this will allow searches for "every first declension word that begins with R" or "every third conjugation verb that's deponent". We will also be adding maps for the geographical entries, pictures of items where appropriate, and updating some of the less-than-modern English Lewis and Short sometimes present.

My thanks to Terrence Lockyer, who kindly posted about it to the Classics list.

Three Successes, Two Failures with Jaunty

After reading about the browser Arora and being of the mind that one can't have too many browsers, I decided to try it out on my Jaunty ThinkPad. I found it easily enough via Add/Remove Applications, but was disappointed that the version in the repository was 0.5 and the web site offered 0.8, which is presumably 60% better than the older version. After doing some research I downloaded the source code, but although it unpacked into a large number of files and folders that looked like they would turn into a browser, I wasn't able to figure out how to get it to run.

I was more successful (eventually) with Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader. I have a .pdf that looks perfectly fine in Preview and Adobe Reader in Mac OS X, but in the default .pdf reader, Evince Document Viewer, it's converted to a hideous sans serif font with striking kerning errors. I decided to check other options, and even though I'm not fond of the time it takes Adobe Reader to start on OS X I decided to download it. It's available as a .bin file and although my first attempts to turn it into an application failed, finally following the instructions here, including the use of chmod 700, I succeeded with the minor quirk that it took me a while to figure out what to do to get it to run (double-click on acroread in Adobe Reader->Adobe->Reader9->bin; who would have suspected?). As I'd hoped, it looked fine.

Lifehacker just had an article on the best .pdf readers and that reminded me that Foxit is available for Linux. I downloaded that and successfully installed it and it renders the file as well as Adobe Reader, which is particularly nice in light of the exploits for Adobe programs that seem to crop up on a regular basis.

Although I wouldn't want to look at ugly output on a screen, my plan to was to print two pages of this .pdf and since I hadn't tried printing from the ThinkPad before I didn't know what to expect. I connected it to an old Epson Stylus Color 740 inkjet printer, hit the Print command, and ... nothing. Not entirely unexpected, but a mild disappointment. After a brief false lead in System->Preferences->Default Printer, I found System->Administration->Printing: pretty straightforward. Adding that printer was also straightforward; it asked if I wanted it to look for a driver, and after I approved and it found and downloaded it I printed a test page and then my two pages without a hitch. My even more ancient laser printer (an Apple LaserWriter 12/640PS) was seen by the computer but I unfortunately wasn't able to get it to work despite several attempts both using Add Printer and localhost:631; I kept getting a "bad device-uri" error even though it appeared that there was a driver for it.

So, installing Adobe Reader and Foxit and printing with the Epson inkjet worked with little difficulty, but running Arora and printing to the LaserWriter didn't. Sixty percent success in this recent batch of experiments isn't bad, I suppose, but I do with it all Just Worked. I'm reading Keir Thomas' Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference and I have some hope that with its help I'll eventually be able to figure out more useful things than how to switch screensavers.

Wine, Lunascape, and IE in Ubuntu Jaunty

My most recent explorations in Ubuntu have involved Wine (a translation layer that allows you run Windows applications on Linux and other *nix platforms) and a couple of Windows browsers.

I had thought Wine was installed by default in Ubuntu but found I was incorrect. Downloading and installing it was quick and painless, thanks to Applications->Add/Remove.

Now for some Windows applications to try it out on.

I recently read about Lunascape, "the world's first and only triple engine browser," which uses the rendering engines underlying Internet Explorer (Trident), Firefox (Gecko), and Safari and Chrome (WebKit); Opera's Presto was not included, nor were a handful of other lesser-known engines. Intriguing, eh?

I downloaded and ran the set-up .exe file with no problem by right-clicking and selecting "Open with 'Wine Windows Program Loader'," but unfortunately several attempts to run it resulted in at best a browser window that darkened after about 10 seconds, after which a warning box opened notifying me that the application was not responding; and at worst, nothing. Further attempts to uninstall and reinstall didn't help and it's unclear how I can remove Lunascape from my Wine programs menu (except possibly by un- and reinstalling Wine itself?) but a bit of research turned up instructions here to remove it entirely after uninstalling it from the Wine menu. I had to use ls to get the official name of the Lunascape folder and rm -r to get rid of it, but I'm getting better at that than I was.

Internet Explorer was more of a mixed bag. By following these instructions I was able to get IE 6 installed and running, but neither the XP nor Vista versions of IE 8, downloaded directly from Microsoft, would open with Wine. The interesting thing about the IE 6 installation is that it requires using the command line to start it: /home/john/bin/ie6, although reinstalling ies4linux created a desktop shortcut to it. I think I'll get rid of the shortcut and just try to remember ~/bin/ie6. That shouldn't be too hard, should it?

At some point when I feel very brave I might try VirtualBox with some of these Windows apps.

Two Ubuntu Challenges Faced and Conquered

I've been enjoying my experiments with Ubuntu and so far I've been able to do most of what I want to without much trouble. I've been particularly pleased with the similarity of some helpful little touches to Mac OS X, but the most recently discovered trick I would have preferred not to have had to use.

When the new 3.5 version of Firefox was released I downloaded it later that same day on my OS X machine by using the "Check for Updates" menu command. I was distressed to see that option grayed out in my Ubuntu Firefox, and even more so when I did some research and found that it was not expected that the new FF would be available in an officially sanctioned form until October's release of Karmic Koala. Almost immediately there were workarounds posted but most were quite intimidating. Fortunately, there are apparently a number of ways to go about it and I ended up using the instructions here, following the easy (fairly easy, anyway) instructions provided by Pritam P. Hans. They worked flawlessly and now the default browser is Firefox 3.5.

The other challenge was more esoteric. Although I'm the only person using this computer, I was curious to see if I could install a new font at the system level, as I do with my OS X computer. Junicode has just come out in a new version and since that's the font I'm using in my on-again off-again Hyginus Fabulae book and I'm hoping to be able to work on it on this computer too, keeping the file synchronized across machines thanks to Dropbox, I need to have the font here locally for XeTeX (actually XeLaTeX) to use. With OS X it's a simple matter of dropping the unzipped fonts into /Library/Fonts, but when I tried that with Ubuntu I was informed I didn't have permission. I ended up using Terminal and sudo mv, and it was here I made my happy discovery of an OS X trick: it's possible to drag an icon into Terminal and have it turn into a path. In fact, I was able to drag all 4 fonts into Terminal and making their destination (as I discovered) /usr/share/fonts/truetype. I was amused with myself because the first time I tried I used mov, which understandably puzzled Terminal since the command doesn't exist, and the second time I forgot sudo and so permission was denied. sudo is the computer's "Simon says," I realized.

In retrospect I realize that it's actually A Good Thing that the system is trying to protect itself by requiring a password before putting anything above the User level and I wonder why OS X doesn't, even for fonts? But I still don't understand why something as basic and desirable as Firefox 3.5 wasn't available to Ubuntu systems via the FF "Check for Updates" feature.

Trying Out Ubuntu

For the last year or so I've been interested in trying out Linux, and last Christmas asked for and received a copy of VMWare's Fusion for Mac OS X. Although it worked adequately to get a sense of the OS, it was slow and laggy and I suspected that running Linux as a guest wasn't giving it a fair shake. However, as a combined wedding anniversary and Father's Day present, at my suggestion my wife got me a refurbished IBM ThinkPad T43 that Buy.com had on special. It's by no means a powerhouse, but for about 1/5 the price of the lowest-end 15-inch MacBook Pro it's quite a good machine, with adequate RAM and hard drive space for my purposes, wireless, and an optical drive. It came with Windows XP Professional pre-installed (no discs for it included), but as soon as I set up and registered Windows — which warned me of the dire danger of not installing protection from malware — I pulled out the CD I'd burned with an ISO of 32-bit Ubuntu and installed it, and found the procedure easier than getting started with Windows (although admittedly a little more time-consuming because of having to tranfer the OS from the CD to the hard drive.

One of the things I was curious about was how close Ubuntu has come to becoming as user-friendly as Mac OS X. I found out pretty quickly that for a beginning user it's as easy or possibly even easier that OS X to use the basic installed applications, but once past basic uses there are ... not pitfalls exactly, but procedures which although not particularly difficult are not as just-works-ish as in OS X.

One good example is producing accented characters. A friend of mine who's moving to Mississippi gave my wife and me a stack of CDs which included the wonderful recording of the Irish accordionist James Keane With Friends Like These. For some reason Banshee — the installation of which was another example I'll write about next — wasn't able to find the album's metadata and I decided to enter it manually and came to a track with the tune "Paidín Ó Raifeartaigh" on it. Acute accents are a breeze in Mac OS X once you know the dead-key combinations (Option-e puts an acute over the next letter, for example).

It turns out that in order to get accented letters it's necessary to specify a Compose key in System->Preferences->Keyboard->Layouts->Layout Options; I still don't know what key or keys can serve to substitute for the AltGr key discussed in this article on accents in Linux. I discovered the Character Map (Applications->Accessories) and it's very similar to OS X's Character Palette, but it's not the easiest way to insert characters. What I find puzzling is that searching the on-line help (i.e., the big blue question mark at the top of the screen) for "accents" leads only to a link to the GIMP manual, and only to the entire work, not even to a particular page of it. This seems like a basic enough question that it shouldn't require as much time to figure out as I've put into it.

Now, for Banshee, I refer the curious to these instructions. I had no trouble following them — in fact, I used apt-get as an experiment and had no trouble at all with it — and I'm very happy with the application, but compared to simply clicking a download link and then double-clicking a .pkg file or a .dmg file and dragging the resulting application to the Applications folder is a lot less scary for the inexperienced.

On checking further I see that it's possible to get Banshee via Applications->Add/Remove Applications, and that's a lot simpler process. I've learned a lesson from this: check that option before downloading it from the website of the developer.

Heaven knows even Macs are not entirely intuitive, but Linux, even a Linux as comparatively easy to use as Ubuntu, is more opaque. That said, for people who aren't going to be installing applications not included with the distribution or who are prepared for a varied experience in ease for ones they do download, I think it's a good potential fit.

Yiddish Literature On-Line

Although I don't know any Yiddish, I was happy to see this morning in Friday's New York Times (courtesy David Meadows' Explorator):

More than 10,000 works in Yiddish — perhaps more than half of all that was ever published in the language — are now accessible online as part of a joint project between the National Yiddish Book Center, based in Amherst, Mass., and the Internet Archive in San Francisco, the two institutions announced on Friday. The scanning began more than 10 years ago as part of a $5 million effort to create the Steven Spielberg Digital Library, said Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the book center.

I was interested to see that those responsible recognize that some people prefer print, because the page linked above adds:

In addition, we can provide you with used copies and reprints of most Yiddish titles at nominal cost. To check availability, please email us at orders@bikher.org, or phone us at 413-256-4900, x196.

I probably would have seen notice of this on Friday except that due to AT&T's poor service my Internet access had been out for most of the last two weeks until Friday afternoon and I had a great deal of catching up to do. I'm in the process of switching all my announcement and discussion list addresses to my Gmail address in the expectation I'll switch providers if it happens again.

Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

Matthew Fisher of UCLA recently posted to the Digital Medievalist list this excellent news of a new site which indexes and links to complete digitized medieval manuscripts in many different collections.

It is with great pleasure that we would like to draw your attention to the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. Hosted by UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Catalogue seeks to provide a technological solution to a simple and rather delightful "problem": the breathtaking increase in the number of medieval manuscripts available on the web in their entirety, but in a bewildering range of venues and formats.

Currently, almost one thousand manuscripts, digitized and available in their entirety on the web, have been entered into the Catalogue. Users can search the Catalogue on basic information about manuscripts, such as the location, language, or date of a codex, or browse through the complete Catalogue.

We welcome feedback on your experience using the website, and particularly welcome suggestions for sites not currently represented in the Catalogue.

The Catalogue can be accessed at: http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu. More information about the project: http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/about.php, or by contacting Matthew Fisher at fisher[at]humnet[dot]ucla[dot]edu.

The site currently links to 37 institutions hosting digitized manuscripts. Although most of the full records include at least a brief note of the contents in the manuscript attributes section, in a random check of about 30 I found three in the St. Gallen collection (Mss. 18, 902, and 722) that do not, and although all the other links I tried worked, the one to the manuscript images for St. Gallen 902 redirected to a 404 message. Fortunately the URL for the error page was specific to that manuscript and simply going up the directory to http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0902/ worked.

I noticed one minor oddity of the interface related to navigation of multipage search results. Page numbers at the bottom of the page link as one would expect, but "Next" takes you to the next span of 10 pages rather than to the page after the one you're at.

Some collections I know of that are not among those indexed are the Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis in Cologne, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, the St. Laurentius Digital Manuscript Library at Lund University, the Olomouc Research Library, and the Irnerio Project at Bologna (although the images there are too small to be of much practical use, I suspect).

A good page of resources on medieval manuscripts can be found at Georgetown's Labyrinth site.

More on Codex Sinaiticus

Back in May I posted about some of the pages of Codex Sinaiticus held by the University of Leipzig being made available on-line. Recently, a cooperative project by the four institutions that own parts of the codex has put up a larger number of leaves from Leipzig and the British Library, including parts of I Chronicles, 2 Esdras and Lamentations, and all of Esther, Tobit, Jeremiah, Psalms (including Ps. 151), and the Gospel of Mark.

The pages are nicely photographed in color, with choices of views with standard light and "raking light," in which illumination is nearly parallel to the page. Even at the highest resolution the images are clear; a transcription is provided, and there's a frame for translations into your choice of English, German, Greek, and Russian, although in spot-checking the only passages for which I found translations were Psalms 1-35, and those only into English.

The first phase will end in November, 2008, and the implication is that after that more leaves will be made available.

The Internet Archive and Microsoft Live Book Search

A recent episode of Leo Laporte's TWiT podcast, number 144 from May 25th, has Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle as the featured guest for the first 50 minutes. He talks about a number of issues, including Microsoft's decision to cease scanning and pull out of the Open Content Alliance, the victory over the FBI in the National Security Letter request and its associated gag order, and other matters related to book digitization.

Evaluating the Quality of Electronic Texts

Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, has an excellent blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. A few weeks ago she posted a clear and detailed comparison of 5 collections of digital texts (Google Books, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Early American Fiction, and Making of America), concentrating on 6 factors that determine the usefulness of each for purposes of scholarship:

• Quality of the scanning
  
• Quality of the OCR/text conversion
  
• Quality of the metadata
  
• Terms of use
  
• Convenience
  
• Reputation in the world of scholarship
  

Presciently she omitted the soon-to-be-shuttered Microsoft Live Book search service.

Her posts are always worth reading, but this one is particularly recommended.

Microsoft Book Search Closing its Cyberdoors

Microsoft announced today that it had advised its partners that its Live Book and Academic search services will be shutting down next week, and that they're going to stop scanning entirely. Fortunately, the content already scanned will continue to be available through Microsoft's general search interface at Live.com.

This is quite unfortunate, because they had done at least as good a job with their interface, provision of metadata, and search capabilities as Google has done with their book search — and often better — and their quality control has been excellent, far better than Google's. The collection made available through Live Books never extended beyond English-language titles (at least I've never seen anything there in another language) and was nowhere near as comprehensive as Google's, but it was a useful supplement.

Some reflections can be found at the Search Engine Land blog, and additional links to related news stories at Techmeme. Peter Suber also provides some extensive quotes from other blogs at his Open Access News blog, and Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, has posted his thoughts at his blog.

ResourceShelf last year provided a useful set of links to other large digitization projects. Oddly, neither it nor the more comprehensive British Columbia site linked there includes Gallica at the Bibliothèque nationale; Gallica is an excellent source of not only French works (including not just books but maps, images, music, and manuscripts), but also of works in other languages, Latin in particular but yes, even some in English. Its interface is less than ideal, but it's usable.

Paleography Resources

Dave Postles of the English Department of the University of Leicester recently announced on Mediev-l the news that he has made available on-line (both directly and as downloads) some resources previously only on CD-ROM, including two tutorials on medieval and early modern paleography (with a self-assessment test; sample question: "Try to convert the regnal year 7 Edward I into the year of grace"), information on the history of the urban development of Leicester, and a book about Oseney Abbey, a medieval Augustinian establishment in Oxfordshire.

Latin at the Vatican Web Site

The Vatican web site has added a seventh language to its six previous interfaces (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese): Latin. This just came up on the Latinteach list but according to a Catholic News Service story, the Latin section went on-line on May 9th.

The contents includes documents of the last five popes, the Nova Vulgata translation of the Bible (which is a slightly cleaned-up Clementine Vulgate), the current version of the Code of Canon Law, the documents of Vatican II, and an assortment of curial documents, with a link at that page to information about the Latinitas Foundation (also in English), with a link there to a page with some entries from the Lexicon recentis Latinitatis published a few years ago by the Vatican. The selection includes:

tortellino

pastillus tórtilis

ranch

práedium rei pecuáriae curandae

popcorn

máizae grana tosta (pl.)

neo-fascism

renovātus fascálium motus

mountain bike

bírota montāna

amnesia

memóriae amíssio

punk

punkianae catervae ássecla

Most entries at the page are in Italian, with a few in English or German.

Those wanting a more comprehensive list and who don't want to put out some or all of the $168 (plus shipping) that the Vatican Bookstore is asking for the full-length book should visit Florus' English-Latin page for a much briefer but still very useful word list.

Codex Sinaiticus and Microsoft Silverlight

Wieland Willker, owner of the New Testament Textual Criticism list, recently posted there that the 43 leaves of the important 4th century manuscript Codex Sinaiticus housed at the University of Leipzig have been made available on-line. He added, "You have to install a little Microsoft tool for the zooming functionality first" and then provided a link to the site.

Besides my interest in main subject of the posting, I was curious about this "little Microsoft tool" and quickly discovered from a response on the list that the site requires a Silverlight browser plug-in, Microsoft's alternative to Adobe's Flash. The author of the response lamented that Silverlight requires relatively recent versions of either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, with no provision for Linux, only a few browsers are supported, and the plug-in's proprietary nature ties it to Microsoft, which can't be trusted.

I responded to the list with some comments which I present below in edited form for those who aren't subscribed to that e-mail list and who might be curious about Silverlight.

Although Professor Willker referred to the plug-in only as required for zooming functionality, in fact the entire site is inaccessible without it. The specific OS and browser requirements can be found at Microsoft's web site. With some exceptions, it's currently supported only on Windows Server 2003, XP, and Vista on Internet Explorer and Firefox, and on Mac OS 10.4.8 and up on Firefox and Safari. Linux users are expected to be able to view Silverlight content sometime around the middle of this year via Moonlight.

Ars Technica has published a few articles about Silverlight and Moonlight, and this recent one about a presentation by the developer of Moonlight talks about some of its advantages over not only simple image presentations but even over Flash. In at least some cases, though, as at the Library of Congress money figures into the equation:

You're probably wondering why the LOC is using Silverlight instead of something more widely supported, like Adobe's Flash. The answer is, of course, money. As we reported back in February, Microsoft gave the LOC $3 million to put exhibits online using Silverlight...

The FOSS community in general is not fond of Silverlight. A couple of examples of arguments against it can be found here and here, although a response to the latter by Moonlight's developer should be read.

One Windows Vista user reported to the list that his computer showed a runtime error with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but an XP user had no problem with it.

I was not able to install the Silverlight plug-in on my Mac OS 10.2 machine; as the system requirements I linked to above show, the minimum on that platform is 10.4.8 (the current version of 10.4 is 10.4.11; the most recent version of the OS is 10.5.2).

I succeeded with my 10.4 machine, although with a minor glitch. My main browser is Firefox, and after a quick download and painless installation of the plug-in, I restarted the browser and discovered on trying the site again that I was offered the same "Download Silverlight" semi-error message I'd been getting before I installed it. I logged out of my account and logged in and tried it again without success. I thought to check the site with Safari before restarting the computer prior to another attempt and it worked perfectly.

I had a guess the responsibility for the problem with Firefox might lie in an add-on. My first instinct was to suspect NoScript, but I don't run it on that computer. Scanning my other extensions I noticed Flashblock. I disabled it and restarted and that time the site loaded perfectly. It was ironic but reasonable that something designed to block the use of Flash also blocked Microsoft's "Flash-killer" (as Silverlight is commonly called, with greater likelihood of eventual accuracy than the Zune becoming an iPod-killer, as Microsoft had hoped).

A curious side-note is that Safari took me to an English-language interface for the web site and Firefox to the original German-language version. Neither seems to provide the capability to switch to the other language, although presumably anyone interested in the MS images wouldn't be likely to be seriously handicapped by that.

Unfortunately (although unsurprisingly given the few browsers explicitly supported) Silverlight doesn't work in Opera, nor in the last version of IE for Mac, now 6-1/2 years old and exceedingly long in the electronic tooth.

A Few Interesting New Testament-Related and Other Early Christian Titles at the Internet Archive

A recent post to the B-Greek list about the availability at the Internet Archive of the first and second volumes of The Grammar of the Greek New Testament by Moulton et al. reminded me that it had been a while since I'd done trial searches there for some keywords of interest (Latin, Greek, lateinisch*, griechisch* — and one nice feature of the site is that an asterisk works as a wild card).

Moulton and Milligan's useful study of the Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (1914-24) in light of the language of the papyri discovered in the late 19th and early 20th century and Moulton and Geden's Concordance to the Greek Testament (1897) are also available.

I was delighted by how many titles seem to have been added since I last poked around there, some (like Karl Staab's 1933 Pauluskommentare aus der Griechischen Kirche: aus Katenenhandschriften gesammelt und herausgegeben) still under copyright (published 1933). This is particularly surprising since it's currently in print. That title and quite a few other 19th and early 20th century German works have a notation "microform" or "microfilm," suggesting they've made their way to the Internet with film or fiche as an intermediate step. The page images I've seen are uniformly quite high quality, whether they've gone through filming or not.

Angelo Mai's edition of Codex vaticanus: Novum Testamentum graece ex antiquissimo codice vaticano (1859) is also at the site.

When I return to the Internet in a week or so after a trip to points north I hope to take some time to explore more extensively.

A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire

Thanks to the good services of Project Gutenberg, A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire by Wadham Pigott Williams (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer; Taunton: F. May , 1873) is now available for use in enriching your everyday vocabulary. It includes useful entries like:

want-wriggle

_s._ mole-track [want or wont being dialectal words for a mole]

taffety

_adj._ nice in eating

laiter

_s._ the whole number of eggs laid by a hen before she becomes broody, ex. She 've laaid out her laiter

clotting, clatting

_s._ fishing for eels with a knot or clot of worms, which is also called reballing

Although the book is fairly short (xii, 42 p.), the definitions are typically as brief as in the samples above and there are many, many choice words included. (Thanks to Dan Goodman, who posted the news and a link to the book on the American Dialect Society e-mail list.)