If you ever type in Greek, Hebrew, or any other language that requires special characters, then you need to make sure you are using a Unicode font. I have written up a pretty thorough guide to using Unicode fonts in Windows and/or Linux, but my Mac knowledge is flaky. If you’re a Mac user and are interested in typing in Greek or Hebrew then follow this guide.
Regardless of your operating system you might also be interested in my introduction to Unicode.
Justin Taylor lists all the ways you can get free access to the ESV.
Some good news from Microsoft: Office 14 and the next Service Pack for Office 2007 will natively support the OpenDocument format (ODF) used by such software as OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. This open-source format has been adopted as a standard by recognized computing organizations and governments worldwide, succeededing to gain support in many areas that Microsoft’s OpenXML format has failed, which has put pressure on MS to respond with a similarly “open” format.
Cnet reports:
For a company that is happy to list a million reasons why Office is better than OpenOffice or Google Docs or other rivals, Microsoft sure is putting a tremendous amount of effort into working better with those products.
The next version of Office will natively support the OpenDocument format (as will the next service pack for Office 2007). As it is developing the next Office, Microsoft is also documenting every change it is making as part of its commitment to documenting all of Office’s various formats and protocols.
For those unable or unwilling to wait, you can download a plugin for MS Office that will add ODF support now. There is one from Sun (which I am given to understand is the version to be included in Office 2007 SP2 and later) or from the OpenOffice community.
As a follow-up to my previous post, here is an excellent review of some more great PDF conversion and manipulation tools.
Also I am happy to report that I have had good success converting PDF images to plain text with OCR terminal, so give it a try!
Rod Decker and Danny Zacharias have reported about a new unicode Greek font that will be of particular interest to those that need text-critical glyphs. From Zacharias’s blog:
I’ve just been made aware of an excellent Greek unicode font that is the most thorough I have ever come across. Designed for the papyrologist and text-critical scholar in mind. The font is called IFAO-Grec and can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. You will see also a documentation page, which lists all of the extra characters available.
You can download the font here.
Rod Decker mentioned in a comment that the font is offered free of licensing constraints:
The only statements I can find re. licensing issues is that “IFAO-Grec Unicode is issued free of all rights” and: “Elle est gratuite et libre de droits” (~ “It is free and free of copyright”). There does not appear to be any reference to any of the “Open” licenses.
This is not quite the protection I would recommend (see my post about Greek font recommendations) but if you need a full text-critical arsenal, this might be a good option.
For most of us, however, some other open-licensed Unicode font might be preferable. Check out my guide for more information and font recommendations for Greek (and Hebrew).
It’s pretty easy to add all the various modules and resources available in Bibleworks to your Zotero database. Follow this guide.
Paper isn’t going away, of course, but having all your documents on such an antiquated medium is often less than ideal. There is at least one major disadvantage to paper: searching is much more difficult. That’s just one of the reasons PDFs are so popular! Anybody can open a PDF file for free, search it for the information they need, and store it for later browsing without any significant impact on harddrive space.
Not all PDFs are Created Equal
But perhaps you don’t know that there are two kinds of PDFs. The best kind of PDF is the kind generated by computer software from a text file. These PDFs are searchable because the text is preserved.
But many PDFs are generated from images rather than text. If you create a PDF by scanning a document in a photocopier or image scanner then the result is usually an image-based PDF, rather than a text-based PDF. This means that your PDF will not be searchable because you computer does not have access to the underlying text, even though you can read it just fine.
Searching any PDF with OCR
So how can you overcome this difficulty? By using Optical Recognition (OCR) software. OCR tools look at the image and try to convert it to plain text, which can then be searched, copy-and-pasted, and indexed just like any other document (I worked with several such software systems during my undergraduate degree).
There are several good free OCR tools available for converting PDF documents to plain text. The best out there is that used by Google, which powers its Google Books services. The problem here is that you don’t have direct access to their software. You need to go fishing and wait for Google to bite. You can find instructions for doing that here.
If you want more control over your software, and you probably do, check out this list of handy PDF tools, many of which are OCR converters. There is also a lot of great software on this list.
Finally a new service, PDF-to-word, currently in invite-only Beta, accurately converts PDF images to MS Word documents. You might have to just bookmark this one since it’s not yet available to the public, but you might find an invite code online, such as here.
Conclusions
One remaining limitation of all this is that the OCR software listed above is optimized for English. Problems often occur with German and French, and don’t even bother trying it on Greek or Hebrew. Nevertheless the advantages for English scanned images are worth investing some time experimenting with one of these systems, especially if you have a lot of scanned PDF documents.
The best kind of multitasking system is the one available to you anytime and anywhere. In today’s electronic world, that often requires having access to your files. What articles do you need to read? Or maybe you have some sermons or lectures you’d like to listen to? Regardless of your specific needs, if for whatever reason you want access to certain files (documents, music, etc.) on the go, there are several options available to iPhone owners.
Drop.io
The excellent and free web service drop.io is frequently mentioned on this blog. It is an easy way to securely share larger files with friends and colleges. But it can also be an excellent capture tool for storing ideas and tasks (read my guide to that here).
Either way, drop.io is now available on the iPhone, which means its usefulness has dramatically increased (for those lucky enough to have an iPhone, which I am not). You can find the app on the iTunes store here.
ZumoDrive
ZumoDrive allows you to access on online storage drive just like you would a hard-drive on your computer. It’s fast and it doesn’t take up any space on your computer or on your iPhone, which means you can keep a whole lot of information there without worrying about filling up your iPhone’s hard-drive. ZumoDrive gives you 1gb for free, and charges $2.99/month for 10gb. For a full review, check out this article.
Soonr
Another web-based storage service, Soonr, allows you to view and edit your documents online. Check out the details here.
Conclusion
All in all there are a lot of options available to those who need access to important files on-the-go. Of course, the options listed here are only available to those with an iPhone. In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have one, and so cannot comment on these based on personal experience. Perhaps the fabled Google Drive will bring mobile cloud storage to the rest of us, and there is always Dropbox (any OS) or Microsoft for (Windows only) if you usually have a notebook or netbook on your person. Regardless, this is the future of multitask computing, so if there is an option available to you, consider setting it up now! You won’t regret it!
We have had many occasions to mention the variety of online resources available for reading and browsing biblical texts here on Nerdlets.org. There is a lot of data online, and the continuing digitilazation of texts means the wealth of data is growing every day.
Here’s the problem: every website or resource database or web-app has a different way of representing that data and the information that describes it, and not all of them provide ways for external sites and apps to interact with that data. The bottom line here is that it is currently impossible, or at least very difficult, to seamlessly “mashup” information from various sources.
For example, say you want to compare the text of John 8 in a couple of ancient Greek manuscripts, all of which are available online, but from different institutions. Currently you would have to go to each site independently, use the disparate methods to extract the data you need, and then mash-them-up yourself using a Word Processor or other tool. Cumbersome, no?
The Open Scripture project has the ambitious goal of solving this dilemma. From their web site:
Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online—manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources’ interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.
It’s still in its infancy, but they have released their first application, the Manuscript Comparator:
This tool allows two or more Biblical (currently New Testament) manuscripts or manuscript editions to be easily compared in side-by-side and unified views (no original unedited MSS are yet incorporated). It demonstrates a fundamental concept in the Open Scriptures framework: semantic linking. All of the contributing manuscripts are merged together to produce a single unified manuscript containing every attested variant; additionally, while merging, a manuscript’s words are linked to their corresponding words in the unified manuscript.
A full review of this tool is coming to Nerdlets.org soon.
The Open Scripture project is open-source, licensed under the excellent GPL 3.0. The source code is available on Google Code.
The people behind Open Scriptures will be presenting at the BibleTech 2009 conference.
HT: Biblical Studies and Tech Tools
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