Longtime readers will know that I am a sucker for stories of interesting scanning projects.
This case study from the ABBYY Newsletter is no exception. It seems that some monks at the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery had a problem:
“We have a number of printed documents in polytonic Greek that we needed to convert into digital text,” said Father Gregory of the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery. “They utilize the full array of classical Greek accents and breathing marks.” Since most unicode fonts support polytonic Greek, he knew it was simply a matter of finding the right tool. “We needed an efficient work flow solution that would undercut the labor involved in typing material by hand.”
In case you’re wondering, polytonic Greek is the type of Greek character used in ancient Greek texts.
The Monastery reached out to ABBYY, and ABBYY hooked them up with a copy of FineReader 10 Pro. While FineReader doesn’t specifically support polytonic Greek, you can train it to recognize the characters.
In exchange, ABBYY got some goat cheese and smoked salmon. Seems like a reasonable trade to me.