It’s pretty easy to add all the various modules and resources available in Bibleworks to your Zotero database. Follow this guide.
Mar 032009
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.
From the Logos blog:
The Göttingen Septuagint (a.k.a. Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum. Auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Editum) is the most important edition of the Greek translation of the Old Testament ever published. At present it spans 24 print volumes and nearly 7,000 pages, setting the bar high for text-critical studies.
For optimal use in Logos Bible Software, these 24 print volumes will be split into 65 digital resources. This means you’ll be able to view the Greek text right alongside of the apparatus, and in several cases multiple Greek translations with multiple apparatuses. By linking them all together, they will stay in sync as you scroll or jump from passage to passage.
Logos is making this resource available for $299.95 for a limited time. Get it here.
You can find a short but concise introduction to this edition of the LXX here. If you would like to learn more about the relevance of the Septuagint for Old and New Testament studies, Karen Jobes’s Invitation to the Septuagint is an excellent resource.
The times, they are a changing. One interesting, and in my opinion welcome, change is a new push by businesses and institutions to move to Open Source Software. Aside from the fact that most open source software is free, there are a whole host of other advantages worth considering. Two that stand out: (1) interpolability and (2) security. These are things every organization needs—you want people you like to be able to see and use the information you provide and you want people you don’t like to, well, not.
Apparently Obama is considering moving government-run technology to a more open model. Obama asked Sun’s chairman Scott McNealy, an open source advocate, to write a white-paper on the benifits. McNealy’s (admittedly biased) take:
It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software….The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software.
Read the whole story here.
In these tough times it will benefit many homes, churches, and non-profit institutions to look into free Open Source software as an alternative to high-priced proprietary solutions. Even just switching from MS Office to openoffice.org could take a significant chuck out of your fixed-costs! Or consider the Gimp instead of Adobe Photoshop, or Zotero instead of EndNote, and Thunderbird or Gmail instead of Outlook.
Feb 232009
Zotero recently released the 1.5 beta iteration of their excellent bibliographical software. You can find that release, along with an excellent video introduction, on their site. A list of new features can be found here.
Feb 192009
There are good reasons for eventually upgrading to Windows 7, but don’t let eye candy be one of them. Avoid the pull of marketing by retrofitting Windows XP. There is a guide for that here.
Or maybe you’re an under-the-hood kinda guy or gal. There are many applications that allow you to get the features provided by Vista and the upcoming Windows 7 up-and-running in XP. A Guide for that can be found here.
Phil Gons has a short little guide on how to import your Logos Libronix Library into Zotero’s database.
As an addendum to my guide to setting up Bibleworks 7 and 8 in Linux, I should mention this encouraging statement from the Bibleworks Website:
BibleWorks comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you purchase BibleWorks directly from us but cannot get it to work with your Windows emulator, you may return BibleWorks for a refund (shipping not included).
Bibleworks 8 now runs in Linux through WINE.
I posted a guide awhile back walking Linux users through the steps required to get Bibleworks 7 up-and-running in Linux (using Wine). It has recently been confirmed that the steps used in that guide also work for Bibleworks 8. If you are interested in running Bibleworks in Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE) you can find the guide here.
Surprisingly, it appears that some problems that plagued Bibleworks 7 in Linux are no longer issues in Bibleworks 8. This is good news!
Lifehacker recently announced that Microsoft has made available the first release candidate of Internet Explorer 8. While I’m still not moving away from Firefox, I am excited about this new release. I have been using the IE8 Betas for awhile now and am impressed—it is definitely a step in the right direction, if only because MS has promised that IE will finally be standards-compliant (why this has taken over a decade, who can know).
The Lifehacker post includes links to the download and to a description of IE8′s new features.
