Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!araja
From: araja@m2.csc.ti.com (Ali Raja)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam
Subject: Re: Proposal for a Machine readable Qur'an
Message-ID: <2053@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 89 07:30:19 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Lines: 26
Approved: naim@eecs.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah)


>	Would anyone be interested in typing a mutually acceptable
>English version of the Qur'an?  The document is not that long, some
>people memorize it.  

:-).  They also spend about two years doing it. :-)

>I believe the Qur'an has some 6300 verses.  If
>we get 63 people, say, that's one hundred verses a piece, a task
>which can probably be completed over a weekend.  

I doubt that you will be able to get 63 people, and be able to 
co-ordinate them easily.  I have access to a scanner which scans
printed text and deciphers it back into ASCII format.  Assuming
about 1/2 a minute a page, and at 7 verses (translated etc.) to
the page I calculate (shut up, Seggev :-]) about 500 minutes or 
so - should be able to do it within a weekend.  It is not perfect
though; it does make mistakes, so it'll have to be proofread;
errors should be obvious - they'll be spellings mostly, and to make
sure that I have not missed/duplicated a page.  

[I also found a scanner with optical character recognition software
 attached to a MacIntosh here at Northwestern. Basalat and I with
 the scanners, and the 20-30 typists that Camm mentioned, should be
 able to get this project finished in a month or two inshallah. --Naim]
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