Digital Text Primer Prepared for: AIEA Roundtable on Digitization of Armenian Documents Saturday 7 October 2006, University of Geneva, Switzerland Roland Telfeyan Robert Coffin October 2, 2006 Charlotte, North Carolina

2 Contents Text encoding  ASCII Problem  Unicode Solution OCR  ABBYY FineReader  Sample scans

3 1963: ASCII Telegraph machines American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) 128 numbers representing  Printed characters, like ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘+’, ‘=’, etc.  Commands to control the print head of the teletype, like “carriage return”, “line feed”, “tab”, “back space”, etc.

4 ASCII: Cont’d 0 nul 1 soh 2 stx 3 etx 4 eot 5 enq 6 ack 7 bel 8 bs 9 ht 10 nl 11 vt 12 np 13 cr 14 so 15 si 16 dle 17 dc1 18 dc2 19 dc3 20 dc4 21 nak 22 syn 23 etb 24 can 25 em 26 sub 27 esc 28 fs 29 gs 30 rs 31 us 32 sp 33 ! 34 " 35 # 36 $ 37 % 38 & 39 ' 40 ( 41 ) 42 * , / : 59 ; ? 65 A 66 B 67 C 68 D 69 E 70 F 71 G 72 H 73 I 74 J 75 K 76 L 77 M 78 N 79 O 80 P 81 Q 82 R 83 S 84 T 85 U 86 V 87 W 88 X 89 Y 90 Z 91 [ 92 \ 93 ] 94 ^ 95 _ 96 ` 97 a 98 b 99 c 100 d 101 e 102 f 103 g 104 h 105 i 106 j 107 k 108 l 109 m 110 n 111 o 112 p 113 q 114 r 115 s 116 t 117 u 118 v 119 w 120 x 121 y 122 z 123 { 124 | 125 } 126 ~ 127 del No indication of type appearance Only numbers representing letters

5 Early Keyboards Keyboards were “hard-wired.” To get a lowercase ‘b’, you press the [B] key, making the keyboard emit code 98.

6 Mid 1970’s: Computer Fonts An array of glyphs, one per ASCII code Character code 97 (‘a’) can be rendered variously: a, a, a, ա,...

7 Significance of Fonts Fonts were the first flexible mapping interposed between the hard-wired keyboard and the printed glyphs. This technology made the Macintosh famous.

8 Font Design Dilemma Now 97 can mean not only ‘a’ but ‘ ա ’. However, should 98 mean ‘ բ ’ or ‘ պ ’?

9 Font Design Dilemma Font designers assigned glyphs to specific character codes that satisfied their own personal keyboard layout preferences. An Armenian text file could not be viewed reliably in absence of the font used to create it.

to 2006: NeXT to Mac Steve Jobs (whose mother is a Hagopian) invented the NeXT computer It had user-definable Keyboard Layouts Today’s Mac OS X is 90% NeXT Today, the placement of letters on a keyboard is a user preference, like the location of windows on a screen.

11 Unicode The character set has been extended to allow for more than 95,000 characters. The goal is a set of standard character codes for every known language. For the first time, Armenian (and other) characters have their own codes, defined by a de-facto international standard.

12 Unicode (Cont'd) The Unicode Character Set is a standard definition of character codes for the glyphs of most known languages. Armenian codes range from 1328 to 1423 (95 codes).

13 But I like my old system If you want Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and more all on the same page using one font with with a consistent look, … If you want to type using your own key layout, … If you want others to be able to read your text in absence of the font or keyboard layout or computer system you used, … … use Unicode.

14 But I have a lot of ASCII Unicode conversion tools at:

15 95,000 Glyphs? With more than 95,000 potential glyphs in a Unicode font, any one font can represent multiple language scripts. How can a computer keyboard address all these characters? User-defined keyboard layouts map selected characters in the Unicode font to the physical keyboard.

16 Review: Two Main Points Keyboard layouts are user preferences that have nothing to do with legibility of text on another system. Unicode text is legible in absence of the fonts or keyboard mappings or possibly the application used to compile it.

“K” ASCII 67 Kevork font Code saved in file Tigran font “G” Different fonts had different glyphs for the same character. Physical Keyboard

“Գ”“Գ” Any Unicode Standard Font (Multi- lingual) ABCD… ΑΒΓΔ … … … אבגד ԱԲԳԴ … ႠႡႢႣ … Physical Keyboard Virtual Keyboard (User Selected) Armenian Georgian Hebrew Armenian Letter “Gim” Unicode 0533 “ג”“ג” “Ⴂ”“Ⴂ” Hebrew Letter “Gimel” Unicode 05D2 Georgian Letter “Gan” Unicode 10A2 Unicode characters are saved in text file— the same Unicode character code for the same glyph, regardless of font. Key Code 67 Keyboard Preference

19 OCR ABBYY FineReader is a commercial multilingual OCR software that recognizes Armenian and many other languages. Built-in dictionaries assist in checking accuracy, and all text is handled through Unicode.

20 FineReader The program is simple yet powerful. The program links each letter of text with its location in the scanned image, for fast proofreading.

21 FineReader (Cont’d) Ample control over page layout Tools to automate large batches Outputs Word, PDF, HTML, XML, …

22 OCR: Results Armenian accuracy depends on typeface and richness of the internal dictionary. Arial Armenian: ~99.9% Times, Aramian, Nork: ~96% Երկաթագիր, Գրաբար manuscripts: not too good ~70%

23 FineReader: Conclusion Tuned for modern, Arial-like letters. We are working with ABBYY to improve recognition rates on old manuscripts and books.

24 Screen Shots On the next slides are:  A screenshot of FineReader  A scanned image  MS Word output

25 FineReader Screen Recognized Text Scan

26 Example Original Scan

27 MS Word Text Output

28 Further Information Questions, suggestions, and corrections are welcome. Updates will be posted to