{"id":186,"date":"2010-04-15T07:44:26","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T14:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/domemtech.com\/?p=186"},"modified":"2010-08-24T12:35:20","modified_gmt":"2010-08-24T19:35:20","slug":"march-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/165.227.223.229\/index.php\/2010\/04\/15\/march-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"March madness…"},"content":{"rendered":"

For several months, I had been editing a new edition of a textbook (Atlas of the Canine Brain, ISBN 978-0-916182-17-5). This book was first published in Russian in 1959, then translated and published in English in 1964. Although the English book was for sale, the publishing company (NPP Books<\/a>) had only a limited number of copies left. So, a Print-On-Demand<\/a> (POD) version of the book was needed. Of course, in 1964 there were no personal computers. (Even in the early '70's, I was still using punched cards<\/a>.) The book was written by typewritten on 8.5" by 11" paper, but the original manuscript, which also included the figures, was lost. Fortunately, the text and figures were recovered from the Russian and English books using a scanner and optical character recognition (OCR<\/a>). Call me old fashioned, but it still seems quite remarkable that the technology exists to recover text from old books.
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However, despite the help of these technologies, the results were far from having the text in a document markup language<\/a> (L<\/a>A<\/a><\/sup>T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a>), which is used to produce a typeset quality PDF file of the book. Current OCR technologies do not produce 100% accurate results, do not generally work well when text is underlined, is super- and subscripted, has language-dependent character accents, or text that is formatted in tables.<\/p>\n

In addition, the bibliography was not in an acceptable style.  Citations throughout the book could not be traced easily to a particular reference in the bibliography. Consequently, the bibliography needed to be converted into B<\/a>IB<\/a><\/span>T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a> format. Although I could have edited the large bibliography using Word or OpenOffice, and use Writer2BibTeX<\/a> to output B<\/a>IB<\/a><\/span>T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a>,  I decided to use Antlr<\/a>, a compiler front-end generator, to parse and translate the bibliography from unformatted text into B<\/a>IB<\/a><\/span>T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem<\/span><\/p>\n

A program is to be written that will input bibliography entries that are in a standard bibliography format for a book.  These entries were produced through the process of scanning the images of the bibliography, converted into text using OCR, then converted to a T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a> format, using OpenOffice <\/a>Writer and the Write2Latex<\/a> plugin.  The output of the program is a bibliography in B<\/a>IB<\/a><\/span>T<\/a>E<\/a><\/sub>X<\/a> format.<\/p>\n