Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 May 5

= May 5 =

Is there a place online that scans a picture/pdf of words and then outputs the text as copy-pasteable text?
Does this request make sense? If I have a large photograph containing a bunch of words, and I'd like to get those words in some sort of editable format, is there a site that will read the photograph (or, if I have to, convert to pdf) and output the text in highlightable format?

Let me know if I need to rephrase the question. 98.176.56.95 (talk) 01:56, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * That's called optical character recognition. Unfortunately, even figuring out which spots contain letters isn't so easy, so a human is probably needed to tell the software things like that.  You can also get your own OCR software, of course.  Many scanners come with such software.  StuRat (talk) 02:03, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * wikisource use that right ? ~Helicopter  Llama~  14:53, 7 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I was just wondering yesterday about something like that for Google Street View. I'm always running into stuff I can't translate because I can't find the keys. I hope the answer to your question is yes, but I don't know. I used to use a scanner at work that did it for English, but it sort of sucked at accuracy. That was early 2000s, though. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:06, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Here are a couple of options. Hopefully one of them works for you. --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 02:15, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks promising. Thanks! InedibleHulk (talk) 02:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * JUst be aware that however you do this you'll need to proofread the text carefully if proper orthography matters. I've been using this technology since the early nineties and it still requires a human eye to ferret out obvious mistakes. μηδείς (talk) 02:36, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

I've tried out some online tools and some downloaded tools and the best one I've found so far is ABBY Online. I think my images were pretty complicated, with non-English characters typed in a table-like format with lines between the cells, but it still managed to interpret and format most of the text correctly. Sjö (talk) 14:06, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That requires a user ID, and it also threw a bunch of advertising links. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:14, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Early history and prehistory
For a long time the supposed date of Christ's birth has been the datum point for the enumeration of the passage of the years. What was the datum point used by the ancient egyptians? Similarly what datum was used by other ancient peoples?Wgc1931 (talk) 10:05, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * For the ancient Egyptians, see Egyptian calendar. For a number of others, there is the handy Template:Calendars.  Dismas |(talk) 10:16, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * For the majority of early chronicles, years are enumerated simply as regnal years (in the nth year of King XYZ). Hence, differing chronologies for Mesopotamia and Egypt depending on which records you believe and how you stitch them together. The conflicting chronologies of Kings and Chronicles are a prime example. Fiddlersmouth (talk) 11:15, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Even the chronologies of the kings of Israel and Judah in the book of Kings aren't quite in harmony. Ancient chronologies were confused by the different calendars used by different cultures. The pre-Julian Roman calendar had a ten-month year, adjusted from time to time by the insertion of intercalary months, but even so the calendar ended up out of sync with the seasons. The Jewish calendar had similar problems. --Nicknack009 (talk) 20:35, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Astronomical events (comets, eclipses, supernovae, etc.) mentioned in ancient chronicles are one of the main tools used to synchronize ancient chronologies with our own. Marco polo (talk) 19:32, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * A well known one is the Roman era, in which years were designated e.g. "349 AUC", standing for "Ab Urbe condita", from the founding of Rome, which according to their reckoning occurred in 753 BC (or 1 AUC). This epithet was not used very much by the Romans themselves, but more by later historians.  This year 2014 AD is 2767 AUC.  Other interesting versions of 2014 are shown in the "2014 in other calendars" box at 2014. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:50, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Adding birth date to a Wikipedia article
Hi, not a great wikipedia user, how can I add a birthday to a page please? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Larmour dob: 10.8.85 Many thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Friendlyedits (talk • contribs) 13:48, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * You need a reliable, published source for that date. Can you tell us where you found that date?  -- Jayron  32  14:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * 1) The Help desk would be the place to ask such a Q.


 * 2) You seem to have added it successfully, although a source would be nice. If you mean you want to add one of those biography boxes on the right side, I wouldn't attempt that, since you'd need a lot more info to fill that out.


 * 3) I added a title to this Q. StuRat (talk) 14:31, 5 May 2014 (UTC)