NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: 1906 Bowditch
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2007 Aug 17, 02:02 -0400
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2007 Aug 17, 02:02 -0400
George, you wrote: "But I can see a snag here. If you requested a search for "LUNAR DISTANCES", presumably, because of that hiccup in the OCR scan, it wouldn't take you to that appendix. However, if you happened to search for "LTJNAE DISTANCES", then it would." OCR of scans like these is better than 95% accurate. So if you search for "lunar" and the word is garbled 5% of the time, you will miss occasional isolated references. But if you're trying to find whole passages referencing lunars, then there's a good chance that you will find it. For example, that appendix contains the phrase 'lunar distance' more than once, so you would find it even though the section heading is garbled. OCR software typically works well on paragraphs of cleanly scanned text in a single typeface. It does less well on titles and individual words in unusual fonts. It performs poorly on math and tabular information. But it's much better than even the best paper index for a book since you can search for phrases that may not have seemed relevant to the original publishers of the book. And of course the search can be extended across the entire collection of scanned documents. You mentioned broadband. You may find that you can get something interesting from google books thanks to the new features which I mentioned in the previous message. Try this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=4GcDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=toc&output=html It should take you to the hyperlinked table of contents of the 1906 Bowditch. I would guess that this page should load in less than 30 seconds even on a dialup line. Then scroll down to the bottom of the contents and you'll see a link to Appendix V "Lunar Distances" (by the way, this is nothing more than the standard treatment of Chauvenet's method which was included in the USN-revised Bowditch after 1880 --if it doesn't interest you, try one of the other chapters, e.g. "Longitude"). Additional pages should load even faster. Downloading the whole book would be prohibitive on a dialup line, but you should be able to read shorter sections this way. Note that the link above automatically sets the display to a plain image rather than the PDF document which should lessen the overhead somewhat. If you want to switch to the OCRed text, click the link that says "View plain text" towards the upper right. -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---