A Book by Oresiesis?

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Difflugia
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A Book by Oresiesis?

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Post by Difflugia »

isaachunter wrote: I ran across mention of a book by the monk Oresiesis (lived in 3-4th century along with Pachomius and Theodorus) who wrote a book about the "monastic discipline." Some cite the book as being "Doctrina de institutione monachorum (Teaching on the Institution of Monks)." Anyone know of an available copy of this online?
I'm not a "seminary student," so I can't post a response in the proper subforum. This will hopefully find you, anyway.

It's not available in English, but you can find somewhat legible scans of Jerome's Latin translation. It was published in Migne's Patrologiæ Græcæ, volume 40, pp. 870ff.

This page lists Google Books scans of all the volumes in that series. Here is a link to the correct page of a scan that didn't look terrible.

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Re: A Book by Oresiesis?

Post #2

Post by Overcomer »

Excellent! Thanks for posting that link, Diffulgia. I'll re-post it in the seminary sub-forum, attributing the find to you, so that Isaac will be sure and see it.

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Re: A Book by Oresiesis?

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Post by Difflugia »

I don't know how much work it's worth to you, but it can be much less than retyping the whole thing. I extracted the thirteen pages you're interested in and ran them through Tesseract OCR software. The result isn't spectacular, but it's not terrible. You can open it in Acrobat Reader and copy-paste the columns into a text editor and I was able to proofread a column in about twenty minutes. It helps if you know at least a little Latin (it's easier to spot typos than going character-by-character), but even so, I'd bet that with eight or so hours of work, you could have a Latin original that you could get a reasonable translation out of.

I don't know how comfortable you are editing text files or HTML, but if you turn it into a simple HTML page (basically just wrapping each paragraph in <p></p> tags), Google Docs will translate the whole thing for you in one go. Upload it to your Google Drive and tell it to translate. If you'd like me to talk through that I can.

I uploaded the OCRd PDF here. I've used that file service before and it seems OK. Just hit ESC when you see the ad for a VPN service and then hit the download button. I just tried it myself to make sure that it didn't change the file or anything.

I don't know how many other scanned texts you expect to use, but I use Tesseract all the time on Greek texts. With clean text (like a good archive.org scan), I get good results with few typos, even with classic accents. Lots of old books have been scanned to archive.org and most have been run through OCR, but it's often English OCR and worthless. Honestly, Tesseract works better on classical Greek better than it does English, probably because there's less variety in Greek fonts than in English ones.
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Re: A Book by Oresiesis?

Post #4

Post by Overcomer »

Excellent information, Diffulgia. Thank you. I wasn't aware of that software, but it looks good.

I'll post another heads-up to Isaac in the seminary sub-forum and refer him to this thread so the two of you can dialogue about it.

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Re: A Book by Oresiesis?

Post #5

Post by isaachunter »

[Replying to Overcomer in post #4]

Thanks to both of you for finding this work and to Difflugia for going the extra mile to post it separately. I downloaded the file. Likewise, I had never heard of Tesseract OCR software, I will definitely be looking into it as I have on more than one occasion needed to translate a text I found online. I currently have a windows 10 app for translation that works pretty well on Greek (can be hit or miss) but it unfortunately does not have latin.

I will be looking into your recommendations. Again, thanks for the information.

IH

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Re: A Book by Oresiesis?

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Post by Difflugia »

isaachunter wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 12:36 amLikewise, I had never heard of Tesseract OCR software, I will definitely be looking into it as I have on more than one occasion needed to translate a text I found online.
Tesseract just does OCR, but Google Docs integrates Google Translate in a way that's pretty easy to use. If you have a scan, it will actually do OCR for you as well, but I find that even a few typos can badly mess up Google Translate. I find that I get better results if I do the OCR, copy the text into an HTML document, then upload the proofread HTML document to Google Docs.

If you have a Gmail account, you have both Google Docs and Google Drive space. While signed into Google, browsing to drive.google.com will give you an interface to upload and manipulate files. Once it's on your Google Drive, right-click and select "Open with" and "Google Docs". From the Google Docs interface, go to the "Tools" menu and select "Translate".

Tesseract runs from the command line and does one image at a time, but it can be scripted. The additional tools I use are:
  • ImageMagick to manipulate images before OCR. Archive.org, for example, typically has full-color scans and I usually convert them to black-and-white.
  • PDFtk to manipulate PDFs. That's the tool I used to separate out the thirteen-page text from the larger original.
  • Ghostscript, the PostScript interpreter. If I'm starting with a PDF download, I use Ghostscript to convert it to an image per page, then run Tesseract on them and use PDFtk to put the result back together.
There are also a few graphical frontends to Tesseract that make it easier to use. I tried a few and didn't find anything I personally liked, but there might be something there that you find useful.
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