Hi Evan and Deborah,
I've noticed that Fine Reader in Kurzweil 1000 does not faithfully keep line
endings when doing poetry where you need every line ending to be preserved.
I thought I would try ABBYY Find READER Version 12 which is available as a
separate purchase.
I started with the corporate edition and then changed to the standard
edition. The scanning and OCR and conversion facilities are pretty
accessible in each version.
The program keeps line endings perfectly always.
I haven't yet figured out how to get it to keep blank lines. I think Deborah
you told me once how to do that in Kurzweil but I don't remember what you
said.
I'm scanning a book with German language text in the left column and English
translation in the right column. It is a collection of German lieder but
this discussion would also apply to an opera libretto.
ABBYY says it preserves the page perfectly but what it does is grab the
German lines for one song, puts them in order, then places all the English
lines below rather than line-by-line to the right.
It's pretty amazing but not what I want.
The reason it's not OK is that songs have a tendency not to finish at the
end of a page. They carry on to the next page. So you have some German, then
some English and then when you get to the next page you have more German
followed by more English of the same song.
If the translation were side by side with a tab character in between each
language, you could globally replace this with a hard carriage return and
have a line of German with a line of English below it. You would alternate a
line of German followed by a line of English.
In the 1990s when I did scanning I always got columns to go straight across
but somehow the logic in these scan engines seems to have changed.
This is just a report in case it's interesting. If you have any thoughts,
I'd be happy to hear them.
