A New Tool for Translating Ancient Script for the Internet

[Jahnava Nitai Das]

[Can someone test this out and post whether it actually works?]

 

A New Tool for Translating Ancient Script for the Internet

From the New York Times

 

NEW YORK, May 15, 2003: Sanskrit is among the world's oldest recorded

language, but putting works created over the last 3,000 years onto the

Web has not been easy. Documents written in Devanagiri, a compound word

whose literal translation means "city of immortals" and whose script is

used for Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, can be scanned as

images. However, optical character recognition, O.C.R., software for

turning Devanagiri texts into digital information that can be searched

and reformatted has not been commercially available. In an effort to

accelerate the development of O.C.R. software for Devanagiri, the

Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition, or Cedar, at

the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the Indian Statistical

Institute are distributing a script-recognition tool that they hope

will become the international standard for software that can recognize

Devanagiri. Their script-recognition software, which can be downloaded

free at www.cedar.buffalo.edu/ILT, can separate lines and individual

characters written in the flowing script. It then offers an on-screen

transliteration in Roman characters for proofreading.

[Guest guest]

 

download here

[Avinash]

I have used OCR a lot. But, I have used it only for English alphabets and not other characters. While using it for English alphabets, I found that it fails only for a few combinations of characters.