From: perseant@stein.u.washington.edu (Dis)
Newsgroups: sci.classics,alt.etext
Subject: ANNOUNCEMENT: FTP archive ftp.u.washington.edu
Message-ID: <1ouirsINN9i7@shelley.u.washington.edu>
Summary: An archive of classical Latin works has begun.
Keywords: etext, texts, commentaries, latin, free, TeX, copyright, copyleft
Date: 26 Mar 1993 09:37:00 GMT
Organization: University of Washington
Lines: 96

[note crossposting between sci.classics and alt.etext]


                             A N N O U N C E M E N T


                   ftp.u.washington.edu:public/classics/texts
                ftp.u.washington.edu:public/classics/commentaries

     As some of you are already aware, an archive of classical Latin
     texts and commentaries is now available at ftp.u.washington.edu,
     directory public/classics.  It is currently very small, but growing.

     The reason for this archive is quite simple: the ancient works are and
     ought to be free, and ought to be available to anyone for what it
     costs to distribute them, i.e., for next to nothing; however, the only
     versions of these works that are available today are either in book
     form (and therefore far from optimum for such purposes as searches and
     statistical analysis) or cost far too much for an ordinary
     person---say, a humble undergraduate student such as myself---to
     purchase.  A similar statement can be made about last century's
     commentaries: although they can be very helpful, they are not
     available except perhaps from moldering tomes hidden away in the
     recesses of a graduate library.

     The volumes that I have put up for public retrieval have been
     determined to be in the public domain: either they never were
     protected by copyright, or their copyright has expired.  They have
     been scanned in using Optical Character Recognition, and corrected by
     hand, since the tools that would be necessary to even partially
     automate the process either do not exist or are kept unavailable by
     restrictive pricing and/or license agreements.

     In addition to the OCR, I have converted the documents into TeX
     format, which means that if you have TeX on your machine, you can have
     typeset-quality output, but can also search the documents as easily as
     if they were straight ASCII.  I chose TeX over PostScript and various
     word-processing formats because:
          (1) the TeX program is free;
          (2) it is already widely used (as an electronic typesetter,
          especially in the fields of mathematics and physics);
          (3) it is machine independent;
          (4) unlike most word-processor document formats, it does not
          make use of ``special'' format characters other than the
          backslash (\): everything is a subset of the usual
          ASCII-less-control-characters;
     and  (5) unlike most PostScript that I have seen, TeX documents
          are intelligible, and can be easily converted, even by hand,
          to flat ASCII.
     In case you don't have TeX and don't want to manually convert the
     documents, I have provided the source code for tex2asc, a TeX-to-ASCII
     converter.  (For anyone who has been looking for such a thing, no,
     this is not a full-featured TeX-to-ASCII conversion program; but it
     will serve the purpose of converting these particular documents to
     ASCII very well.)  I will also provide PC/MS-DOS and VAX/VMS
     executables, and sometime in the near future I should be able to
     provide a Macintosh executable as well.  (I will never be able to
     provide as many Unix executables as there are Unices; however EVERY
     Unix machine has a C compiler.)

     Although I have corrected these texts as well as I am able, doubtless
     some errors have escaped my notice.  If you should find any, let me
     know and I will correct them immediately.  I will also continue to
     update and improve the tex2asc program, and I will add to the library
     as I am able.

     As you can well imagine, however, entering the entire body of
     classical Latin literature is not the work of one man.  I must ask
     you, therefore, if you have the time and the means, to scan in some
     classical text, correct any errors that the scanning process has
     introduced, and send the result to me (perseant@u.washington.edu) by
     e-mail.  I will then place the text that you have scanned into the
     appropriate directory, after converting it into TeX format.

     About contributions:  Although I'd rather have your time, I will
     certainly accept contributions of money, OCR software, or hardware,
     should you feel the need to donate it.

     About Greek: since the OCR system that I have cannot recognize Greek
     characters, and since I am somewhat less capable in proofreading Greek
     than Latin, I am not able to provide any Greek texts.  If someone is
     willing, however, to enter and proof Greek texts, I will be more than
     happy to convert them to TeX format---or at least a portable format---
     and place them into the public directory here.

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     Konrad Schroder, Undergraduate Math & Latin Major
     University of Washington, Seattle       18025 59th Ave. SE
     Internet:  perseant@u.washington.edu    Snohomish, WA 98290
     Telephone: (206) 486-3893               USA
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