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Anyone knows why most of the "s" characters have become "f"? eg: beft, fucceeded etc. Interestingly, nothing else seems to be wrong (at least I didn't spot any
by tsycho 15y ago
Anyone knows why most of the "s" characters have become "f"? eg: beft, fucceeded etc.
Interestingly, nothing else seems to be wrong (at least I didn't spot anything else). And it's not even consistent, eg: crofs (instead of cross, so only one 's' became 'f' here).
- twstws 15y agoThose are 'long s' characters, not f. They were used for lower case s at the start or middle of a word. I don't recall why.
- dchest 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
- ig1 15y agoOCR software tends to have problem with the ligatures used for "s" in old fonts so often transcribes them as "f". More expensive OCR software tends to get around this by using probability models to guess the correct word (i.e. "best" is much more likely than "beft"), but I'm guessing they're using some mid-range OCR package.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoSeriously? Did you even look at the pages in question? They are reproductions of the originals, and maintain the original fonts and orthography. This includes the long s, as well as certain ligatures (like ct), and has absolutely nothing to do with their choice of OCR software. In fact, there's no indication that OCR software was used at all.
- nobody3141 15y agoHe didn't say it did - but it is an issue with converting and indexing old documents. Google's ngrams for instance regularly transcribes them as 'f' so you have to search for both possibilities.
- ig1 15y agoThe indexing seems based on OCR, for example try the keyword search "Tranfactions"